The story of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB false defector who went rogue

”In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited”

By W. Alan Messer (2013)

Note: I say “putative” because Nosenko’s case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, and KGB true defector Peter Deriabin (1954) determined that Nosenko couldn’t have been a KGB officer because he didn’t know such simple things as how to send a cable, how many floors of the American Embassy were used by the CIA (3), and where the cafeteria in the KGB headquarters building was.

My comments are in brackets.

. . . . . . .

The controversial case of KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko has centered on the contention that he was a double agent for the KGB. Heretofore, compelling evidence suggesting that he was bad has contended with the compelling argument that he must be good because the KGB would not be so foolish as to orchestrate a double agent case in this manner. A third theory seeks to square the circle with a conclusion that is roughly compatible with both arguments. In the process, the argument demonstrates how truly professional operational counterintelligence ought to be conducted.

THE VOLUNTEER

In late May 1962, the answer to the average case officer’s most fervent desire appeared at the door of a hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland, and was introduced as Yuriy Nosenko, a major in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB). The SCD was responsible for domestic counterintelligence, with a strong focus on counterespionage within the Soviet Union. Even more tantalizing was his claim that he had been the deputy chief of the American section, which targeted the American Embassy and monitored the large staff of diplomats, military attachés, communicators, Central Intelligence Agency officers, and support personnel. Here was a potential gold mine. Nosenko had been detailed as the security escort for a visiting Soviet delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, but strangely was staying at a hotel two kilometers away from the delegation’s hotel. He had been in Geneva for over two months but had imprudently been spending official funding advances on booze and broads and now faced the inevitable accounting at the end of this trip. Failure to account for official funds would ruin his career and he was prepared to trade information for the sum he needed. [2] Ostensibly desperate for some modest funding to escape his fate, Nosenko now faced CIA case officer Tennent ‘‘Pete’’ Bagley. After some preliminaries about his KGB position, family situation, and financial problem, Bagley then asked him the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: what is the most important thing Nosenko believed he had to tell the U.S.? Referring to what he called ‘‘the most important spy the KGB ever recruited in Moscow,’’ Nosenko identified him as a sergeant and cipher machine mechanic codenamed ‘‘Andrey.’’ Although he had been recruited in 1949 or 1950, he had returned home and Nosenko’s former boss, Vladislav Kovshuk, had traveled to the United States to reactivate him. [3] Suddenly, Nosenko asked if Anatoliy Golitsyn had told the CIA about the Finnish President. Golitsyn had been a KGB counterintelligence (CI) officer who had defected to the CIA in mid-December 1961. [4] This was a rather alerting initiative on Nosenko’s part, potentially suggesting a probe of the CIA’s knowledge. At the time, the coincidental timing of the Golitsyn and Nosenko cases and the reporting coverage of both cases was rather striking since each officer had served in rather different KGB elements and capacities. Finally, as he was exiting the room, Nosenko said that he knew how Popov was caught. [5] Military intelligence (GRU) Lieutenant Colonel Petr Popov was probably the most important Soviet agent run by the CIA up to that time, and his demise had naturally sparked intense questions about the source of the compromise. This tantalizing tidbit was probably meant to ensure that another meeting would be arranged with Nosenko, and over the next week four more meetings would be held. [6] Less than two years later, in January 1964, Nosenko reappeared in Geneva, again escorting a visiting Soviet delegation. On 25 January, in his first meeting with Bagley and a noted CIA case officer, [possible “mole”] George Kisevalter, Nosenko dropped the bombshell. As a deputy section chief in the SCD’s Tourist Department, he was there on 16 October 1959 when Lee Harvey Oswald sought to defect to the Soviet Union. Two months before Nosenko’s new appearance in Geneva, Oswald had assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Now Nosenko asserted that the Soviets had taken no real interest in Oswald before he had returned to the United States in July 1962. Not only did the KGB not surveil him, bug his apartment, or tap his telephone while in the Soviet Union, but the one alarming development— when Oswald met with the KGB Residency in Mexico City in September 1963—was merely due to Oswald’s offer to re-defect to the Soviet Union. [7] After the assassination, Nosenko claimed he was tasked to recall Oswald’s very thin file from Minsk and review it. [8] Over the next several days, Nosenko talked about at least six other CI cases, including the compromise of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, who had served as an agent jointly for the CIA and British MI-6. [9] Suddenly, nine days after the first meeting, Nosenko announced that he had been tipped by a member of the KGB Residency that a telegram had arrived recalling him unexpectedly back to Moscow. This tipped the scale and forced the CIA to fly him to the United States for further debriefing and eventual resettlement. By this time, the recipe for controversy was already baking in the oven.

SUBSTANTIVE REPORTING

Every significant counterintelligence lead that Nosenko provided in 1962 and 1964 raised serious questions about his reporting. Nosenko claimed in 1962 that his SCD chief, Vladislav Kovshuk, had traveled to the United States to recontact a recruited agent, the U.S. Army cipher machine mechanic codenamed ‘‘Andrey.’’ But this story subsequently engendered suspicions. Supposedly recruited during his tour of duty in Moscow from the fall of 1951 to the fall of 1953, ‘‘Andrey’’ in fact never had access to any sensitive portion of the machines he was servicing, and yet the chief of the SCD’s American Department had traveled to Washington over three years later, in January 1957, ostensibly to meet with ‘‘Andrey.’’ [10] Kovshuk had arrived in Washington under a false name on a permanent assignment, yet he waited nine months to meet ‘‘Andrey’’ (in October 1957) and departed well short of tour almost immediately. [11] ‘‘Andrey’s’’ phone number and address were readily available in a phone book. [12] Why then had Kovshuk waited nine months before contacting the target of his travel mission? The answer was embedded in yet another CI case [the Edward Ellis Smith case]. At one point, Nosenko was asked about the first CIA station Chief in Moscow, Edward Ellis Smith, who had been tasked to locate drop sites for Popov and was [probably] familiar with the case. Smith was ambushed by the KGB in a rather typical sex trap in September 1956 and was out of the Agency in October. [13] [In his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, Author John M. Newman says James McCord, later of Watergate notoriety, helped Smith remain secretly employed by the Agency at the Hoover Institution.] In 1962, Nosenko claimed to have participated in the entrapment of Smith, but that he had refused the pitch. [14] However, Smith told a CIA colleague that he had languished in Washington through the spring of 1957 waiting for a job in California and spent most of his time going to movies. At the same time, FBI surveillance detected Kovshuk, together with two other Soviet officials, frequenting movie houses and behaving in a suspicious manner. The two other officials were the same two who had been with Nosenko in Geneva when he first met Bagley. Furthermore, Kovshuk and one of the other officials had applied for their visas in November 1956, just after Smith departed Moscow. [15] In 2000, the KGB would admit [in a history of the KGB] that it had recruited Smith. [16] So the ‘‘Andrey’’ story peddled by Nosenko was false and likely designed to distract from Kovshuk’s true mission—and thus also the true mission of Nosenko. Skillful KGB surveillance techniques played the dominant role in Nosenko’s explanation of arrested CIA assets. In 1962, Nosenko had claimed that Petr Popov had been discovered in January 1959 by surveillance that detected a CIA officer in Moscow mailing a letter to Popov. [17] [Correction: George Winters was’t a CIA officer but a diplomat at the American Embassy who was coopted by the CIA station to perform some tasks for it] According to Golitsyn, however, the KGB began monitoring Popov while he was still serving in Berlin in September 1957. [18] [Newman says Popov was betrayed in early 1957 by a KGB “mole” in the CIA by the name of Bruce Leonard Solie and his two accomplishes — Edward Ellis Smith and James McCord.]

Popov’s arrest, probably sometime between mid-November and early December 1958, naturally raised the sixty-four thousand dollar question in counterintelligence: was he compromised by a mole? At one point in 1962, Nosenko had volunteered a story about KGB technical recordings that captured a discussion between an American military attache´ and an Indonesian military attache´ named ‘‘Zepp.’’ Pete Bagley made a point of confirming the spelling with Nosenko. [19] Unknown to Bagley, this related to the compromise of the next major CIA penetration of the GRU, Oleg Penkovskiy. He had volunteered to the British in March 1961 through the intermediation of a British businessman, Greville Wynne. [20] Both Penkovksiy and Wynne were later arrested by the Soviets and tried in May 1963. Well into his prison sentence — in October 1963 — Wynne was brought back for questioning, confronted with a tape recording of a conversation he had with Penkovskiy, and asked about the identity of ‘‘Zepp.’’ Wynne later told the British when he was released that he and Penkovskiy had discussed a B-girl named ‘‘Zeph’’ [nickname for “Stephanie”] at a Moscow restaurant meeting in May 1961. [21] So, over a year before Wynne corrected the KGB misunderstanding, Nosenko had conducted a probe of the subject with Bagley. When Nosenko was asked in 1964 about Zepp, he denied ever saying that, and claimed the bugged conversation involved the Indonesian Deputy Military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Zen. [22] And yet Nosenko [at Bagley’s request] had actually spelled out the name in 1962.

Nosenko had reported a seemingly unrelated detail spinning off from the Popov theme. The last contact for Popov, U.S. embassy security officer Russell Langelle, had been superseded in his tour by John Abidian, occasionally employed by the CIA for operational tasks. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had surveilled Abidian, hoping to catch ‘‘another Popov,’’ but had no luck. [23] A maid, coopted by the KGB, had only managed to recover the panties of an American girl in his bedroom. Nosenko returned to this episode in 1964 when he claimed that KGB surveillance observed Abidian setting up a dead drop in December 1960. As the man responsible for monitoring Abidian, Nosenko continued to receive surveillance reports week after week for the next three months. [24] There were only two problems. Penkovskiy — not the CIA —had set up the drop site. More importantly, Abidian went to the drop site in late December 1961 — not 1960. Nosenko claimed that he transferred from the KGB’s American Department to the Tourist Department on 31 December 1961 and thus would not have received surveillance reports over the next three months. [25] Even more troubling was the fact that Abidian had been provoked to visit the site based on a phone call that only vaguely resembled Penkovskiy’s signaling system [given to him by Kisevalter and his other handlers in Paris in October 1961]. Though the CIA felt the need to visit the site, it concluded that Penkovskiy had not made the call [Abidian checked the empty dead drop a few days after Christmas]. All of this had happened about a week before Nosenko ostensibly left the American Department. [26] Furthermore, at the time Nosenko was first talking to Bagley [and Kisevalter in Geneva in June 1962], the KGB would have been actively monitoring Penkovskiy — a fact that Nosenko, himself, would report in 1964. Thus, the KGB would have been motivated to peddle the red herring about a woman’s panties to distract from its own investigative bungling. Addressing the ultimate subject directly, Nosenko flatly claimed that KGB surveillance had detected Penkovskiy in an early 1962 meeting with a British diplomat. When asked for the source of this information, Nosenko could not recall and suggested it might have been Yevgeniy Tarabrin, chief of the British Department. [27] The contradictory references to sub-sourcing or the simple lack of sub-sourcing was becoming as monotonous as it was frustrating.

In 1962, Nosenko had reported that the KGB had planted microphones in the U.S. Embassy. This was hardly earth-shattering news at the time, but Nosenko claimed to have read transcripts from ten different offices and he identified two of them. This, despite the fact that his identification of two classified floors in the American embassy was off by one entire floor. [28] When pressed on the microphone issue, Nosenko said that it was impossible for an officer in his position to know anything more. Only ‘‘the guys who plant them’’ would know. [29] These represent only a fragment of the CI cases and leads that Nosenko reported, and a very small fragment of the contradictions and inconsistencies in Nosenko’s story.

From all Nosenko’s reporting, Bagley drew up a list of the fourteen most significant items that overlapped Golitsyn’s previous reporting, including seven leads to Soviet spies. Of these seven, four were well on the way to being arrested based on Golitsyn’s reporting, but in three other cases [Popov, Gryaznov and Belitsky] Nosenko contradicted Golitsyn. [30] Once Nosenko was stateside, Bagley pursued a low-key series of debriefings, intending to elicit every scrap of detail documenting Nosenko’s version of events. This series of interviews then culminated in a polygraph session in April 1964 at which Nosenko not only went south on the ‘‘box,’’ but made several meaningful admissions that he had lied. This, in turn, led to sequestering him in a Maryland safehouse for nine months of hostile interrogation and finally to sequestration (with the approval of the U.S. Attorney General) in a classified CIA compound in Virginia — the nature of which itself created controversy. The case generated passionate debates within the ranks of the CIA [thanks to the meddling of Richard Kovich and Lenord V. McCoy] before Director Richard Helms reversed the direction of enquiry in 1966, replacing Nosenko’s handlers with a new set of faces. [31] This renewed effort led to Nosenko’s [1968] exoneration [by probable “mole” Bruce Solie] and the development of an intense cadre of partisans arguing in his favor. At this point, each side was identified with a particular theory of the case. Those favoring Nosenko included Bruce Solie, the Office of Security officer who was placed in charge of a new round of interviews, as well as SB Division reports officer Leonard McCoy, and John Hart, the chief of Europe Division, who was drafted in 1976 to conduct yet another review of the case [Tennent H. Bagley successfully rebutted Hart during the 2978 HSCA hearings]. The underlying theory here was simple: Nosenko was a valid defector who provided reporting that was largely true and damaging to Soviet interests. The cadre on the other side of the issue included the Agency’s Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, Pete Bagley, and Bagley’s boss, SB Division chief David Murphy. To them, the growing volume of evidence suggested the theory that Nosenko had been dispatched by the KGB for the purpose of defecting and spreading disinformation within the CIA. This was designed to blind the CIA’s counterintelligence efforts to track down KGB moles within its own ranks and, at the same time, insulate the Soviet Union from culpability in the Kennedy assassination. Their position came under withering fire from Nosenko’s partisans over the years, and the nature of those partisans’ arguments is best represented by three of the most prominent critics.

JOHN HART

Hart’s methodology in cracking the Nosenko case began with his portrait of Nosenko as a KGB captain and recently promoted deputy section chief in the American Department who is so dazzled by the glitz of his first foreign trip that he indulged in booze and broads with ‘‘little sense of responsibility,’’ only to wake up in a hotel room after a night of dalliance to find his official stipend of $250 missing. [32] Now, Nosenko’s ‘‘only major fault was one shared by many of his contemporaries—a weakness for liquor.’’ This dereliction with official funds could ‘‘have ended his career,’’ and so he indulged in a ‘‘quest for help’’ that ‘‘proceeded with the simplicity of a childhood dream.’’ [33] As a result, he ‘‘naively’’ volunteered to the Americans. He was apprehensive about the KGB presence in the city since a ‘‘private meeting’’ with Americans in an apartment building ‘‘smacked of clandestine activity.’’ He was also concerned that the Americans would not ‘‘understand his problem.’’ [34] Taking refuge in drink along the way, he arrived at the meeting drunk. This ‘‘immature young Russian’’ then proceeded to provide Bagley ‘‘nothing more than a childish proposal,’’ little more than ‘‘a plea for help from a very unsophisticated young man.’’ [35] That Nosenko was then thirty-five years old and had been a KGB officer, according to his claims, for ten years in the repressive apparatus of Soviet domestic counterintelligence [today’s FSB] does not register with Hart. Bagley denied that Nosenko was drunk, and the transcriber of the tape recordings [possible “mole” George Kisevalter] of that meeting never indicated that drink interfered. Could Nosenko have been so ‘‘naïve as to believe that his meeting with Americans in an apartment did not ‘‘smack of clandestine activity?’’ Hart’s characterization is a revealing reflection of his own state of mind. Hart then claimed that an earlier Soviet defector [Pyotr Deriabin] later transcribed all the tapes of the 1962 meetings, comparing them with Kisevalter’s notes and discovered 150 errors. [36] Nowhere does Hart reveal any error that materially changed a conclusion about the case, and nowhere does Hart reveal that the corrections were made as preparation for a round of interviews with Nosenko after he was polygraphed. Furthermore, nowhere does Hart reveal that the defector transcriber was former KGB major Petr Deriabin or that Deriabin had conducted his own evaluation of the case. Nonetheless, the Hart argument moved on to showcase the role of CI Staff chief James Angleton, whose allegedly paranoid musings poisoned the atmosphere surrounding ‘‘everything having to do with the CIA’s Soviet operations.’’ [37] This, in turn, influenced ‘‘the atmosphere in which Nosenko was judged.’’ [38] Angleton’s ‘‘disorganized mind’’ was backstopped by the then-recent KGB defector, Golitsyn, whose own propensity to paranoia saw in the KGB ‘‘an evil, ubiquitous force,’’ so much so that he perceived the Soviet–China schism as simply a strategic deception operation. Golitsyn asserted that the KGB would dispatch ‘‘spurious defectors’’ to discredit his own reporting. [39] All of this supposedly reflected Golitsyn’s paranoia, as diagnosed by a CIA psychiatrist. But this finding was dismissed because ‘‘the ‘shrinks’ were not taken seriously by many CIA executives.’’ [40] Here though, is a standard of evidence curiously ignored in Nosenko’s case, for it was Bagley who had solicited the evaluation of Nosenko by an Agency psychologist: an evaluation that deemed Nosenko a sociopath. [41] Hart then charged that an initially favorable Bagley was turned by Angleton using the nefarious Golitsyn as support. [42] Now, according to Hart, the CI staff and Bagley’s own SB Division planned jointly to browbeat Nosenko ‘‘based on a presumption of guilt, regardless of the lack of any proof.’’ [43] Their plan sought to get Nosenko to ‘‘confess to some vast Machiavellian plot’’ with himself as a ‘‘major player.’’ Once this was achieved, he would be turned over to the Soviets in anticipation of his execution by them. Alternatively, ‘‘the inevitable result’’ would be Nosenko’s death ‘‘by some means or other.’’ [44] At no point did Hart reveal in his book The CIA’s Russians that the man who made the decisions regarding Nosenko’s interrogation was the chief of SB Division, David Murphy. This was the same Murphy who would see his professional reputation fall under a serious cloud at the hands of Angleton. Hart does not even register the faulty logic that would expect the Soviets to execute their own double agent or the illogic of expecting that Nosenko would die ‘‘by some means or other.’’ Instead, he asserts, ‘‘the vicious theories spawned by Angleton, Bagley and others were the product of undisciplined minds trying to cope with a reality that was intellectually beyond their grasp.’’ [45] These charges stretch credulity and sit on the page of his book as pure assertions in the absence of any hard evidence. This is a strange position to take for one who charged Angleton—and by inference Bagley—with ‘‘looking for a culprit’’ and presenting ‘‘no clear or logical reason,’’ let alone ‘‘any valid evidence’’ to suspect Nosenko of covering for the Soviet role in the Kennedy assassination. [46] To Hart, Nosenko ‘‘quickly became entangled in the investigation’’ of Kennedy’s death. No one would ever know from Hart’s testimony that Nosenko had offered his knowledge of the Oswald file as a major selling point for soliciting American acceptance of his offer to defect. [47] If he was ‘‘entangled,’’ it was in a web of his own making. Nevertheless, Hart continued in this vein, discussing the Angleton-driven atmospherics of the case and the disposition of Nosenko in solitary confinement. But absent from his pages is any discussion of Nosenko’s claims and counterclaims. While Hart indicated that Bagley ‘‘had built up an elaborate case’’ against Nosenko, he never revealed the basis for this case—perhaps because to do so would jeopardize Hart’s own special pleading. [48] At no point in his lengthy chapter on Nosenko does Hart deal with any of the hundreds of facts Bagley splatters across the pages of his book Spy Wars. Hart merely avers that the fundamental problem upon the Russian’s defection in February 1964 was that ‘‘Nosenko’s honesty was his undoing’’ because ‘‘he did not ... embroider or even distort what he knew in order to excite his interrogators’ interest and thus enhance his own value in their eyes.’’ [49] Instead, Nosenko ‘‘had been telling the truth ever since he first made contact with an American in 1962.’’ [50] Thus are all the apparent discrepancies swept under the rug and Nosenko can be celebrated for ‘‘his own strength of character’’ that saw him through his ordeal. [51] As an approach to counterintelligence, Hart’s method is utterly vacuous and smacks of the common phenomenon of a case officer who has ‘‘fallen in love with his agent.’’ In his haste to praise Nosenko, however, Hart overlooked the most potent argument he could have thrown at Bagley.

LEONARD MCCOY

Leonard McCoy was a senior reports [and requirements] officer and later deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff who became [in 1965] a fierce partisan of Nosenko’s validity. In his review of Bagley’s book, McCoy castigated what he termed Bagley’s ‘‘sadly mistaken judgment’’ in support of a ‘‘transparently invalid analytical methodology.’’ [52] In characterizing Bagley’s presentation, McCoy painted it as a ‘‘series of postulates, assumptions, speculations, and hypotheses ... ’’ But completely missing from McCoy’s list are simply facts. Bagley presented facts by the truckload, and what McCoy did with them attests to McCoy’s own ‘‘methodology.’’ Much of McCoy’s review replays all the complicated interpersonal relations among officers within the CIA’s Directorate of Plans (later Directorate of Operations). Much of this centered around the legitimately controversial character of James J. Angleton. He then traffics in the charges and countercharges of professional incompetence centering around Angleton. McCoy’s main argument seems to be that so many luminary officers reviewed the Nosenko case that anyone should thereby be persuaded. Mercifully, the personal hallway politics within the Agency are omitted from Bagley’s book — at least initially — for it is largely a factual recitation of inconsistencies and enigmas to be resolved. And McCoy’s appeal to authority is simply irrelevant. When he does confront the question of facts, McCoy appears not to disagree with any of it, but rather relies on the judgment of Agency psychologist John Gittinger that Nosenko exhibited all the qualities of a sociopath: self-centeredness, detachment from personal relationships, absence of remorse, and indifference to truth. In an earlier article, McCoy admitted that Nosenko had ‘‘lied’’ to Bagley, but that ‘‘it should have been clear that he was an individual to whom lying was a normal component of official and personal life.’’ [53] McCoy means for this to remedy the case against Nosenko and validate him as a bona fide defector. Relying on the CIA psychologist, McCoy argued that Nosenko ‘‘lied obviously and repeatedly about himself, but for his own psychological reasons, not at the behest of the KGB.’’ [54] That Bagley cites exactly the same evidence should be an alert to the non sequitur involved: ‘‘normal lying’’ does not necessarily establish bona fides. [55] If all agree on Nosenko’s propensity to lie with alacrity, how could anything he would report be trusted?

RICHARDS HEUER

Richards Heuer’s own analysis provided clever intellectual rationalizations presuming that a counterintelligence analyst employs one of five separate approaches to the evaluation of an agent case: the motive approach, the inconsistencies approach, the litmus test approach, the cost accounting approach, and the predictive approach. But an ‘‘asset’’ or ‘‘spy’’ is a human being whose essence should be considered as a whole. All too often the scrutiny of an asset is carved up and sub-contracted out in segments, with one group in the intelligence organization looking at his reporting, another at his operational behavior, another at his personal biography and the consistency of his statements, while another looks at his psychology. But these individual threads constitute the fabric of a single person, and all aspects of any explanation should likewise be integrated into a unified narrative. Heuer’s multiple constructs, to the contrary, lead him astray, as when he asserts that the ‘‘motive approach’’ postulates that if the motive is proved, then circumstantial evidence may be sufficient to prove guilt. [56] To be sure, this is a caricature of anyone who would consider an asset’s motivation. Any professional approach would appreciate that motive is only one facet of a case and not necessarily the keystone in the arch.

Heuer seemed fixated on the notion of ‘‘proof,’’ the most extreme form of which was John Hart’s claim that, because of his own ‘‘standards of scholarship,’’ he would never ‘‘go beyond the bounds of certainty’’ nor ‘‘extrapolate from facts.’’ [57] Now, proofs are found in mathematics where conclusions are deductively conclusive given certain basic assumptions. Alternatively, proof is found in laboratory experiments where extraneous variables can be eliminated or controlled, and a very precise relationship can be proved because the experiment can be replicated over and over again. But even this approach abstracts from the variables encountered in reality. This is the difference between science and engineering, where the latter must deal with the interaction of scientifically determined relationships along with extraneous variables in the real world that may never have been subjected to laboratory experiment. All other matters are subject to some form of ‘‘statistical’’ method, generating conclusions that are ‘‘true’’ only within certain boundaries drawn by probabilities. Is the sun certain to rise in the east? Yes, but only if a large asteroid does not collide with the earth, sending it off its axis and halting its spin. Thus, almost certain to be true, but not perfectly. Now the task is to apply this to Heuer’s construct that if motive is proved, circumstantial evidence will be sufficient. If motive cannot be ‘‘proved"— presumably not using circumstantial evidence for that ‘‘proof"— is circumstantial evidence then no longer admissible? To anyone who has actually run a spy case or participated in the validation of cases, almost all evidence is circumstantial or problematic when it comes to the bottom-line conclusion—a tough but realistic reality. In contrast to circumstantial evidence is Heuer’s own method of argument when he engaged in his own version of the motive approach, asserting that Nosenko’s ‘‘motive was to conceal embarrassing elements of his personal background and to exaggerate his importance.’’ [58] All of this was as plausible as it was speculative. And speculation is not evidence — circumstantial or otherwise.

And then there is the ‘‘anomalies and inconsistencies approach.’’ Is this just more inadmissible circumstantial evidence? Two forms of inconsistencies are obvious. One is a claim from a source that is inconsistent with some notion of normal, expected reality. Here, Heuer claimed that ‘‘the CIA had very little information on the Second Chief Directorate’’ so the CIA simply formulated a stereotype. One of those was that of a deputy section chief and the collateral false assumption that he would be fully informed of all matters within the branch. [59] Nowhere did Heuer prove this point about Agency ignorance and, in fact, the CIA had a large body of information regarding aspects of normal KGB practice. Petr Deriabin defected in 1954, as did Vladimir Petrov. [60] Yuriy Aleksandrovich Rastvorov also defected in 1954. [61] Anatoliy Golistyn defected in 1961 out of the Helsinki Residency. A thorough debriefing of each would have stuffed the files with volumes on KGB administrative and operational practices. But the CIA actually went one step further. The second form of inconsistency is simply contradictory statements made by the agent himself or by other witnesses. This formed the overwhelming thrust of Bagley’s narrative and much of Heuer’s argument. What Heuer called the ‘‘anomalies and inconsistencies approach’’ was merely an exhaustive recitation of all the contradictions offered by Nosenko in the course of years of interview and interrogation. To each separate example, Heuer would appeal to accident, coincidence, inaccurate translation, inadequate debriefing, or misunderstanding. Like Hart, Heuer complained that the first meeting transcripts were poorly rendered and a faithful Russian language transcript was done only in 1965. [62] Perhaps so, but Bagley was working Nosenko face-to-face from the first meeting and understood Russian while Nosenko spoke English. And for much of the time, Bagley had a native speaker, [possible mole] George Kisevalter, by his side. Neither one had to appeal to transcripts to know what he heard. And Heuer, like Hart, never cited a single case where the facts presented by Bagley were contradicted by a transcript. Heuer admitted that Nosenko provided a wrong date for his entry on duty with State Security but appealed to ‘‘personal idiosyncrasies’’ and embarrassment at a delayed graduation from university as the explanation. [63] When he was not engaging in such speculation, Heuer simply dodged the issue. Acknowledging the Abidian affair and Nosenko’s contradiction regarding his own access to the surveillance reports, Heuer asserted that Nosenko’s story ‘‘was interpreted’’ as refuting his own claim to have worked in the American Department. [64] Yet Heuer never disputed the evidence, let alone the interpretation. Heuer then claimed that Nosenko’s handlers misunderstood him as a person. Here Heuer admitted what Bagley himself has written. Nosenko was the spoiled brat son of the USSR’s Minister of Shipbuilding Industry (and for two years the Minister of Medium Machinebuilding, responsible for the development and production of nuclear weapons). After poor performance over the first few years, Nosenko was recommended for dismissal and saved only by political pull. When he contracted VD, he used false KGB documents to obtain treatment. He was then caught and thrown out of the Komsomol, spending fifteen days in jail. [65] How a KGB officer with enough political pull to remain in the service could then end up as a jailbird — and yet remain in the KGB — is a major mystery Heuer avoided addressing. Apparently, this is how to ‘‘understand’’ a subject. Trying to navigate around this enormous iceberg, Heuer suggested that Nosenko ‘‘may’’ have been dispatched abroad by the SCD in order to get him out of the way. [66] Apart from again being pure speculation, this conjecture suffers from the obvious alternative. Nosenko could have instead been more easily ‘‘lost’’ by being assigned to Ulan Ude or Petropavlovsk in the Soviet Far East rather than to a sensitive security job on the turf of the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence — FCD) in Geneva where the threat of defection was far greater. Hart had offered yet another excuse in addressing the most significant reporting from Nosenko concerning the infamous KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald. To Hart, the Oswald reporting had been ‘‘incredible’’ and he suggested that it be ignored. Hart had attributed this to an ignorance born of extreme compartmentation within the KGB. Even though Nosenko was uninformed, he ‘‘genuinely thought otherwise.’’ Though Heuer believed that ‘‘such a possibility was understandable in principle,’’ even Heuer could not accept this. But even here, Heuer’s assertion of plausibility failed to explain how a compartmented subject, that is, off limits to those not in the compartment, could even grace the lips of Nosenko, let alone how he ‘‘thought otherwise.’’ Never once did Heuer reveal that John Hart had admitted in that same 1978 congressional testimony that he, Hart, ‘‘knew nothing about Oswald’s case.’’ [67] In the end, Heuer insisted that ‘‘most of the discrepancies that generated suspicion have been resolved"— a highly presumptuous claim given how he himself had ‘‘resolved’’ these particular issues. [68] Heuer’s academic approach failed to grasp the essentially statistical nature of real CI case analysis. Bagley presented 194 pages [of HSCA testimony] loaded with discrepancies, inconsistencies, and contradictions, laced generously with admissions by Nosenko that come under suspicion only because even the admissions may be questionable. Each contradiction constituted a data point. Heuer’s method was to argue against each data point, largely from speculation regarding the forces that could account for that point. Now, environment, psychology, and motivation can all play a role in the treatment of these data points and, with something more than speculation, they can be removed from the purview of the hypothesis and even set against it. But the sheer volume of data points in the Nosenko file argues for consideration of the totality and hence of the total subject. Bagley conducted what can best be described as a narrative regression analysis, in which a hypothesis is compared to all the data points to determine the extent to which those data points correlate with the hypothesis. The greater the correlation, the more likely the hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis that Nosenko was a legitimate defector must often purchase its credibility by denying any importance to the central reporting in his case, treat each data point as totally random, or emphasize the psychological behavior that compromises the credibility of any other information he provided.

CASE FACTS

What then are the ‘‘case facts’’ so assiduously avoided by Hart, Heuer, and McCoy? Nosenko’s reporting on the Oswald case was accompanied by reporting on a wide variety of espionage cases and other CI episodes. All of this raises questions of access and bona fides. And here lies an interesting story. The thrust of all the criticism has been directed at Pete Bagley, allegedly ensnared in the Svengali-like influence of James Angleton and his notions of ‘‘monster plots.’’ But another figure appearing in the shadows has never been adequately acknowledged.

The Deriabin Factor

Petr Deriabin had served in KGB domestic counterintelligence [the Second Chief Directorate — today’s FSB] and foreign intelligence [the First Chief Directorate — today’s SVR] for ten years before he defected in 1954. His credentials were impeccable, and no critic has ever questioned them. So much so, that not only was Deriabin enlisted to transcribe the tape recordings of the 1962 and 1964 meetings, but he was allowed to interview Nosenko over a dozen times early in the stateside phase of the case. Deriabin composed an analysis, the bulk of which appeared in Bagley’s Spy Wars, and the interviews that formed the basis for this analysis yielded some very interesting ‘‘facts.’’ Apart from his contradictory claim to have joined the KGB in September 1952, Nosenko’s later claim to have joined state security in mid-March 1953 was accompanied by the statement that he could not recall whether this was before or after Josef Stalin’s sudden death. [69] For an American, that would be like forgetting the chronological location of Kennedy’s assassination in one’s own resume. The precise date was important, because Deriabin knew from his own tenure in its Personnel Department that the KGB was not inducting new officers during the immediate turmoil following Stalin’s demise. Furthermore, the sons of ministers and generals were then generally not accepted into the KGB. And Nosenko had apparently admitted that his father-in-law had been in prison and his own mother had a noble family background in Tsarist times — something anathema to the KGB. [70]

Contradictions and Aberrations

Finally, Nosenko claimed that he had avoided these difficulties because his application was endorsed by the politically important KGB general Bogdan Kobulov. But Kobulov was serving in the Foreign Trade Ministry until Stalin’s death on 3 March 1953 elevated the notorious Lavrentiy Beria to head the renamed MVD. Beria, in turn, elevated Kobulov to be his deputy. Then, in the ensuing turmoil, Beria was overthrown and Kobulov was arrested and shot by 23 December — not a very auspicious endorsement for Nosenko’s career. [71] For the first year of his KGB employment, Nosenko claimed he was a member of neither the Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) nor the Communist Party. [72] As a former Komsomol secretary, Deriabin flatly denied that this was possible, even with the political pull Nosenko belatedly claimed. To anyone familiar with the KGB, Nosenko’s claim was impossible and, for him as the son of a Soviet minister, doubly so. Nosenko admitted he had been ‘‘inattentive, in trouble, badly regarded by his fellow officers, hardly conscious of his duties, and doing only low-level work’’ for his first three years in the KGB. Despite the fact that his powerful father had died in 1956, Nosenko did not suffer since, he claimed, this simply galvanized him to straighten up. So, he became a deputy section chief in 1958 and, within four years, he was promoted to section chief and then deputy department chief, even though ‘‘his rank promotions were being held up because his record was bad.’’ [73] Now, Nosenko was providing this story after his initial claim in Geneva in January 1964 that he held the rank of lieutenant colonel. Under questioning, Nosenko could not identify a single case supporting his claimed operational proficiency. Moreover, he was ignorant of the KGB operational procedures he would have had to follow. [74] Furthermore, he claimed to have used safe houses for his operations but was ignorant of the procedures regarding safe houses. [75] Nosenko appeared in Geneva in early 1964 with a travel document listing his rank as a lieutenant colonel, but KGB practice required that such documents be turned in at the end of official travel. Failure to do so would preclude getting paid or engaging in any further travel (as to Geneva). [76] Nosenko claimed that his promotion had been approved by the Communist Party’s Central Committee when Deriabin knew full well that promotions went to that level of authority for approval only when the rank of General Major was at issue. [77] Subsequently, Nosenko confessed that he was not a lieutenant colonel. Nosenko claimed that in 1955–1956 he performed such low-level work as running name traces, but could not identify any of the procedures and forms that would have been routinely used and followed. Although he claimed to have worked in the files, he could not identify most of the file types and documents they would have held. [78] Although Nosenko claimed to have been a security officer escorting delegations to Geneva twice and been a lifelong counterintelligence officer, he could not describe how the KGB checked out its own citizens before traveling abroad. [79] And Deriabin would have known since he had served as a foreign counterintelligence officer in Vienna, principally to monitor Soviets posted abroad, but often to deal with visiting Soviet delegations and their escorts. [80] Likewise, Nosenko claimed to have served in positions where cable writing would have been mandatory and frequent. Yet, he was incapable of describing how a telegram was prepared and sent. [81] Regarding Moscow headquarters, Nosenko was ignorant of the restaurants in the KGB’s headquarters building, of the KGB Club, or of the elevators in the newer part of the headquarters building. [82] In the end, Deriabin was the perfect antidote to Heuer’s charge that the CIA’s ignorance of KGB practices had resulted in the use of stereotypes. These facts, and a dozen more he unearthed, convinced Deriabin that Nosenko was not a KGB officer, ‘‘at least not in the Moscow headquarters.’’ Nevertheless, Deriabin was convinced that Nosenko was closely connected in some capacity with the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. [83] In the process, Deriabin developed some intriguing clues regarding Nosenko’s true resume, noting that Nosenko was far more familiar with concentration camp jargon. Nosenko claimed to have a KGB serial number at a time when officers never had such numbers. In fact, the only ones with serial numbers were prisoners. [84] Nosenko also bore a tattoo that was partially defaced for reasons that made no sense to Deriabin, and yet tattoos were characteristic of prison experience. [85] All of this strikes at the very heart of the notion of bona fides. Was Nosenko who he said he was? Ultimately, Nosenko passed out of this world without leaving any certainty about this most fundamental feature of a valid agent case.

THE WELL-CHARGED CHALLENGE

While both Leonard McCoy and Richards Heuer suffer significant deficiencies in the persuasion department, both presented one particular argument that is serious and must be dealt with. McCoy’s whole point in surfacing the observations about Nosenko as a sociopath was to ask the question: Would the KGB have selected such a dysfunctional personality to serve in the role of a long-term disinformation agent in defector mode? [86] Never mind that the CIA sought to use such a dysfunctional personality to lecture its own staff on proper intelligence practices and the truth about Soviet intelligence—doing so even after the Agency had determined that he was a sociopath. Never mind as well that the sociopath who should not have qualified as an important KGB double agent could nevertheless qualify as a KGB officer with access to so many important cases, presumably because of the important functions he performed in most of them. Despite these logical difficulties, McCoy was nibbling at the central conundrum. Heuer got closer to the nub of the issue: The principal counterargument [to Bagley] was the simple assertion that the KGB would never mount such a deception because of the cost to itself in information given away ... and the risk that a KGB defector, penetration, or disaffected provocateur might compromise the entire enterprise at any time. In addition, ... to obtain Politburo approval to place one of its 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. [87] Interestingly, this is a theory of the case that Bagley does not dodge. His own hypothesis was that the KGB originally planned to send Nosenko to Geneva simply to execute chapter two of his dangle operation. By limiting the frequency and duration of agent meetings, the KGB could avoid subjecting their double agent to detailed questioning. What changed the plan was the unanticipated assassination of President Kennedy and the resulting ‘‘frantic cables’’ to the KGB’s Residency in Washington, D.C. insisting that everything be done to spike the notion that the Soviets were behind Oswald’s action. [88] In order to provide ‘‘more authoritative and convincing’’ evidence, the Soviets would ‘‘require defection, even if only temporary,’’ of a Nosenko, armed with putative direct access to the Oswald files. [89] While Bagley’s boss, David Murphy, was persuaded that it was a plausible hypothesis on which to base a hostile interrogation, two factors subverted this theory. First was the fact that Nosenko actually remained in the United States to his dying day. At no time has anyone apparently ever identified his wife and children. Furthermore, Nosenko apparently never sought to be reunited with them, nor they with him. [According to Bagley in Spy Wars, Nosenko was tape recorded in 1964 mumbling to himself in a near-trance-like state that his real name wasn’t George and that he wasn’t married. See below.] This led to the second inconvenient consideration: Nosenko’s performance, even before the hostile interrogation began, was neither authoritative nor convincing. And the KGB would have known that, had its gamble come unraveled, it would have apparently revealed a ‘‘cover-up’’ and led to the very conclusions the KGB sought to avoid. That said, Heuer and the others had a difficult case as well, for the argument breaks down into two separate propositions. First, that Nosenko had never been a dangle to the Americans. Second, that Nosenko was not dispatched as a defector by the KGB. The uncontested facts at this point refute the first proposition. The only telling objection from Heuer and McCoy concerns the second proposition, and this notion constitutes the circle that can be squared.

A Third Theory

Applying the notion of a narrative regression analysis, what hypothesis then consumes the most evidence? What theory of the case most closely correlates with all of the data points provided by Nosenko and surrounding circumstances? What theory can address both the first and second propositions? Nosenko was inducted into the KGB, but soon thereafter fell into disfavor and landed in jail over some malfeasance. But he was probably recognized by KGB officers as being very gifted in the arts of recruitment. Being a sociopath did not mean he was not naturally smart and blessed with an abundance of the kind of social intelligence that made for a good case officer. Two features of the KGB culture suggest they capitalized on his plight. First, the KGB often spotted, assessed, and recruited people in jail—either to snitch on fellow inmates or be released to snitch on the rest of society. Second, the KGB had a tradition of inducting ‘‘agent-recruiters’’ into their web. Over a ten-year career of being placed in many internal investigative situations, Nosenko would come to know a wide variety of internal counterintelligence officers, who by their very nature, did not live under cover—unlike their foreign intelligence counterparts. So the KGB could expect to use Nosenko on carefully controlled double agent operations. The KGB then launched Nosenko’s expedition to Geneva in June 1962, and his first meeting with the CIA betrayed all the signs of a dangle operation. Nosenko controlled the timing and duration of meetings. He led with a story requiring the CIA to remunerate him, but modestly so. And the story regarding his financial need justified why he had waited until the end of this two-month tour to volunteer to the CIA—conveniently also controlling the length of his exposure to CIA questioning. He provided all the sentimental appeal of a loving family back home that would justify his rejection of the defection option. He led with revelations about cases that were then of burning interest to the CIA, such as the Popov case, and tantalizing stories about code clerks. His ‘‘most important’’ revelation that started off the first meeting ended in a statement only at the very end of the meeting suggesting his knowledge about the Popov case. Clearly, this was the more important case he could discuss, but Nosenko had to manage the timing of this revelation, which guaranteed the need for a second meeting.

Ancillary Events

The appearance of Nosenko in the quiet background of the Barghoorn arrest in October 1963 suggested that the KGB was setting Nosenko up for another dangle operation in Geneva—but this was one month before Kennedy’s assassination. Yale Professor Frederick Barghoorn had been ambushed by the KGB after someone stuck some papers in his hand as a pretext for the arrest. Barghoorn’s subsequent description of these events contradicted Nosenko’s version. Furthermore, Barghoorn noted that a man resembling Nosenko sat quietly in the background on only one occasion, ‘‘glowering.’’ [90] Presumably, Nosenko was there as window dressing to backstop his later story to Bagley when he next appeared in Geneva. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, the Soviets knew for sure that Oswald was a dedicated Communist and had met with their intelligence officer in Mexico City just before the assassination. They also knew that this officer, Valeriy Kostikov, served in the Department of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence), dedicated to the art of assassination. [91] [Correction: The only reason the CIA believed Kostikov might be Department 13 was because Kremlin-loyal Aleksei Kulak — J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA at the FBI’s NYC field office — said in 1962 that Kostikov’s charge at the UN, Igor Brykin, was a Department 13 agent.] Anyone could connect the dots. In the ensuing panic, the Soviet leadership tasked the KGB, which just happened to have an operation ready to go. So Nosenko was dispatched to Geneva in January 1964, equipped with the story, or ‘‘theme’’ (tema) in KGB parlance, about the Oswald files. This was only one year after Nikita Khrushchev had walked the Soviets to the brink of nuclear war and America was in no mood to view the Soviets with any tolerance. Any smell of complicity in Kennedy’s assassination could lead to who knows what. The SB Division had already made the connections, discovering a photograph of Oswald in Minsk and knowing of the Kostikov meeting. The Soviets had to spike this gun — and spike it fast. Meanwhile, Nosenko had the requisite social cleverness and native intelligence to grasp the cards he held. He had the feed material of the century that related to the crime of the century. Here was gold to sell. At the same time, he wanted to get out of a Soviet Union that had jailed him and lashed him to the traces of a security service snitch. The West in all its opulence and opportunity was waiting just around the bend. Nosenko demonstrated over and over that he was a hedonist, for whom ‘‘booze and broads’’ was the epitome of life, and the KGB had inadvertently provided him with the ticket out to the theater of that lifestyle. He had his dangle manager and the Soviet leadership above him right where he wanted them and, so, sensing that this was the moment, he defected. In contrast, a knowledgeable KGB would be motivated to avoid any gratuitous action to compromise Nosenko. They knew that Nosenko’s appeal to the CIA for resettlement in the United States depended overwhelmingly on the value of the information he provided to the Agency, and the crown jewel in the bevy of revelations was the Oswald story they had provided. The KGB had every reason to suspect that Nosenko might continue the ruse. If the Soviets wanted their story to be ‘‘authoritative and convincing,’’ they would have to play along with his defection—however sub-optimal the tactic—as long as he demonstrated his allegiance to the desired cover story. He would peddle the ‘‘theme’’ for them, and they would keep quiet or perhaps even facilitate his ruse in the temporary custody of the CIA. What choice did they have? Having planned for a rapid series of meetings in Geneva followed by Nosenko’s return to the Soviet Union, the KGB now had to face the fact that their dangle had fled the coop. And they had to cross their fingers and hope.

Gaps in the Theme

This would explain why Nosenko was so poorly prepared for defection. It would explain the inadequacy of his background, the contradictions in his testimony, but also the tenacity with which he held onto the essentials of his story. He was going to wear the Americans down in the hope that the sheer ambiguity of his own performance, combined with the predictable cohort of gullible Americans, would eventually come to his rescue. And the Soviets had plenty of experience with gullible Americans, going all the way back to John Reed and the October 1917 Revolution. More recent was the astounding behavior of the U.S. State Department in burning a potential collaborator [Cherepanov] by turning over his illicit information to his Soviet masters. This scenario would also explain one of the truly difficult conundrums of the entire case. When he traveled to participate in the search for Cherepanov, Nosenko had exited the Soviet Union with a document signifying he was a lieutenant colonel. Aleksandr Cherepanov, a former SCD officer, had passed a bundle of [dated, “Popov was uncovered in 1959 by superior KGB surveillance”] KGB documents through a visiting American businessman to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that claimed to reveal the role of KGB surveillance in catching spies. Against the admonitions of the CIA, the State Department decided to return the documents to the Soviet government, ostensibly blowing Cherepanov. The Americans were then led to believe that Cherepanov had fled into the interior of the Soviet Union and was tracked down and arrested. [92] Nosenko was supposedly sent to identify the unfortunate Cherepanov. During his polygraph interrogation in April 1964, Nosenko admitted he was not a lieutenant colonel, but rather a captain. He nevertheless argued implausibly that the rank was merely a misprint on an otherwise valid document and could not explain why the department chief would have signed such an obviously erroneous document. [93] Nosenko had insisted in January 1964 that he defected because a telegram had been received from Moscow recalling him and suggesting that the KGB was on to his collaboration with the CIA. [The NSA later determined that no telegram with that number of characters had been sent from Moscow to Geneva that day.] Now in April, he admitted this was a lie. [94] Just after the polygraph sessions, when under intense interrogation and seeking to justify his claimed positions within the KGB, he blurted out ‘‘You have a source in New York. Ask him!’’ [95] Just who was this source? At the time Nosenko defected, the FBI had been running a KGB officer, Aleksey Kulak, in New York City since March 1962. [96] Kulak was an officer in Line X (science and technology) of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence). Before Nosenko made his confessions, Kulak had reported to his FBI handlers that Nosenko was a lieutenant colonel and had defected when a telegram had arrived in Geneva recalling him. [97] How would Kulak know about the lie regarding Nosenko’s putative rank? More importantly, how would Kulak know about a ruse that Nosenko had concocted on the spot in Geneva to motivate the CIA into accepting him as a defector? Finally, how would Nosenko—who had spent his entire career in domestic counterintelligence (or so he claimed) and never visited the United States—even know an Aleksey Kulak, let alone his relationship with the FBI?

Dropping the Shoes

For this theory to work, Nosenko had to have communicated with the KGB after he defected. And perhaps that explains why he demanded his freedom to visit bars and nightclubs as far away as Baltimore when he first defected. [98] Years later, Bagley would note that he and Deriabin had asked themselves how Nosenko could have communicated with the KGB, without the CIA ever knowing. [99] [When Bagley died in 2014, he had only recently come to suspect that Office of Security’s Bruce Solie, who in 1962 made a special trip to Geneva to pass questions to Nosenko about the possible “moles” Golitsyn was telling Angleton about (“Nosenko drew a blank”), was a KGB “mole.”] Apart from that one problematic element, this third theory most nearly correlates with the known facts in this enigma. But the theory also explains the next shoe to drop. After Nosenko admitted that he had lied about his lieutenant colonel rank, Kulak told the FBI that he had heard that Nosenko was not really a lieutenant colonel but had been a captain. [100] Years later [in 1978 or so], the FBI [temporarily] would deem Kulak to have been a dangle operation. [101] So Kulak’s pivot was probably orchestrated by his dangle managers. Even if Kulak was innocently peddling the disinformation coming from KGB headquarters, what interest did the KGB have in peddling this erroneous story to the troops in the field? And then peddling a correction to the story? The notion of a rogue Nosenko nevertheless pursuing Soviet ‘‘active measures’’ objectives perhaps also explains why Nosenko, after admitting to numerous lies and contradictions, ultimately said that he ‘‘could not’’ confess. [102] His whole future in the United States depended on a rearguard resistance. It would also explain his otherwise enigmatic resistance to confessing the errors in his story about Abidian when he said ‘‘If I admit I wasn’t watching Abidian, then I’d have to admit that I’m not George, that I wasn’t born in Nikolayev, and that I’m not married.’’ [103] Perhaps this was a backhanded admission under intense pressure that, in fact, he was not married, not related to Minister Nosenko—in short, not who he claimed to be. Nosenko himself was making the logical connections and understood that, as the cards started to fall, perhaps the ‘‘domino effect’’ could become irreversible, jeopardizing his future. Ironically, John Hart was probably right in insisting that it was Nosenko’s ‘‘strength’’ that ensured he would eventually survive, even if it was not a ‘‘strength of character.’’ [104]

ULTIMATE MEANINGS

All of this, of course, has made a critical assumption regarding the facts of the case. Those facts are overwhelmingly supplied by Spy Wars, the book that Bagley published in 2007. Avoiding overarching ‘‘monster’’ plots, conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination, and paranoid speculations regarding the KGB’s superhuman powers, Bagley pursued the facts of the case. Perhaps Bagley is lying about every fact in the book. Perhaps he is lying about only half or a third or even four assertions. But in all the controversy, no one has ever contradicted any of Bagley’s facts— perhaps because they are still available in the archived files. Nonetheless, the silence is very telling. Whether the theory I offered to square the circle is correct is not the main point of this exposition. The main point is that the CIA needs more Bagley-buttressed approaches to such cases, with this degree of attention to detail, logic, and self-honesty if it is to prevent another defector like Curveball who lit the fuse to the 2003 Iraq war, or another double agent like Humam al-Balawi, who killed eight intelligence officers in Khost. [105]

Productivity Needs Reliability

Apart from the challenging task of recruitment, agent cases consist of only two important features: the productivity of their substantive reporting and the reliability of that reporting. Absent the reliability, the productivity is worthless. Whatever the merits of the case on any of the three sides to this argument presented herein, Tennent ‘‘Pete’’ Bagley has provided the finest example of how a truly professional intelligence officer goes about the business of ensuring reliability. His method patiently solicits as much detail as possible, asks penetrating questions, and refuses to blink in the face of contradictions. It does not subdivide a human subject into ‘‘approaches’’ or categories, but considers the subject as a whole person, drawing on whatever tools of analysis and insight that recommend themselves from the nature of the evolving debriefing record. Ultimately, the seeds of evidence are deposited into the tool of narrative regression and result in some problematic correlation of data with the various, alternative theories of a case. Most importantly, the method requires liberal doses of dedication and courage—reflected in Murphy’s decisions—to make it work.


REFERENCES

1 All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other U.S. government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

2 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 5–6. 448

3 Ibid., p. 7.

4 Ibid., p. 8.

5 Ibid., p. 9.

6 In fact, the case officer had already arranged for another meeting. Why Nosenko would postpone the revelation of his most important message until the end is in comprehensible unless he had been coached in advance with a script he was not nimble enough to rearrange in response to the unforeseen, premature arrangement of follow-on meetings.

7 Ibid., pp. 84–85.

8 Ibid., p. 86.

9 Ibid., pp. 86–91.

10 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

11 Ibid., p. 65.

12 Ibid., p. 185.

13 Ibid., pp. 69–70.

14 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

15 Ibid., p. 70.

16 Ibid., p. 71, citing A. Kolpakiki and G. Prokhorov, Vneshnyaya Razveda Rossii (Russian Foreign Intelligence) (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000), p. 70.

17 Ibid., pp. 11, 73.

18 Ibid., pp. 71–75.

19 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

20 Ibid., p. 21.

21 Ibid., pp. 150–151; tape recording information from Bagley, private correspondence, 11 February 2001.

22 Ibid., p. 152.

23 Ibid., p. 16.

24 Ibid., pp. 88–89.

25 Ibid., pp. 148, 161–162.

26 Ibid., pp. 148–149.

27 Ibid., p. 87.

28 Ibid., p. 54.

29 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

30 Ibid., pp. 24–26.

31 Ibid., pp. 197ff.

32 John Limond Hart, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), pp. 128–129.

33 Ibid., p. 130, emphasis mine.

34 Ibid., p. 131.

35 Ibid., p. 132.

36 Ibid., p. 149.

37 Ibid., p. 136.

38 Ibid., p. 137.

39 Ibid., p. 138.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., p. 100.

42 Ibid., p. 139.

43 Ibid., pp. 149, 142.

44 Ibid., p. 149.

45 Ibid., p. 150.

46 Ibid., p. 141.

47 Ibid., p. 142.

48 Ibid., p. 147.

49 Ibid., p. 146.

50 Ibid., p. 159.

51 Ibid.

52 Leonard McCoy, ‘‘Book Review: Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, by Tennent Bagley,’’ CIRA Newsletter, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 37–41.

53 Leonard V. McCoy, ‘‘Yuriy Nosenko, CIA,’’ CIRA Newsletter, Volume XII, No. 3, Fall 1987, p. 19.

54 Ibid., p. 20.

55 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 100.

56 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘‘Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment,’’ in H. Bradford Westerfield, ed., Inside CIA’s Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency Internal Journal 1955–1992 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 387. Originally published in CIA, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall 1987, pp. 71–101.

57 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 218, footnote 27, citing the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1978.

58 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘‘Nosenko, Five Paths to Judgment,’’ p. 395.

59 Ibid., p. 401.

60 Petrov joined the OGPU in 1933 and worked in the cipher section of the Foreign Department (INO) in which capacity he was posted to Australia in 1951 by the then renamed MGB.

61 Yuriy Aleksandrovich Rastvorov served in the MGB’s Foreign Department (INO) in Japan 1946–1954 and defected with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

62 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘‘Nosenko, Five Paths to Judgment,’’ p. 399.

63 Ibid., pp. 398, 400. The term ‘‘State Security’’ is used here to refer to the same organization that earlier traveled under various titles. Known as the OGPU (Unified State Security Directorate) from 1923 to 1934, it was then the GUBG (Chief Directorate of State Security of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) (1934–1943), the NKGB (1943–1946), and the MGB 450 (Ministry of State Security) up to Stalin’s death in 1953. Under notorious Lavrentiy Beria, it was known as the GUGB of the MVD until the title KGB was adopted in March 1954. See Amy K. Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 323. Henceforth it will be referred to as the KGB.

64 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘‘Nosenko, Five Paths to Judgment,’’ p. 397.

65 Ibid., p. 400. Nosenko never told Bagley up to late 1966 that he had been fired from the Komsomol or that his parents had intervened to save him. Bagley private correspondence, 18 February 2011.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., p. 402; Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 217.

68 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., at ‘‘Nosenko, Five Paths to Judgment,’’ p. 402.

69 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 249.

70 Ibid.

71 The Generals of World War II on Generals.dk, at http://www.generals.dk/ general/Kobulov/Bogdan_Zakharovich/Soviet_Union.html

72 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 252. That this contradicts Heuer’s claim that Nosenko admitted being thrown out of the Komsomol probably reflects Nosenko’s own prolific contradictions.

73 Ibid., p. 250.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., p. 252.

76 Ibid., p. 250.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid., p. 251.

79 Ibid.

80 Peter Deriabin and Frank Gibney, The Secret World: The Terrifying Report of a High Officer of Soviet Intelligence Whose Conscience Finally Rebelled (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 282–285.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid., p. 252.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., p. 255.

85 Ibid., p. 252.

86 Leonard McCoy, ‘‘Yuriy Nosenko, CIA,’’ p. 21.

87 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., ‘‘Nosenko, Five Paths to Judgment,’’ p. 392. Apparently Heuer was relying on the Cost Benefit approach at the expense of any other ‘‘approach.’’ Also note that Heuer was relying on presumptions about KGB and Politburo practices even as he claimed the CIA had no good background on such issues.

88 Oleg Kalugin and Fen Montaigne, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 57–58.

89 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 180, 203.

90 Ibid., p. 97.

91 Ibid., p. 79.

92 Ibid., pp. 165–167; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 185.

93 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhim, The Sword and the Shield, p. 187.

94 Ibid., p. 188.

95 Ibid., p. 190.

96 Ibid., p. 163.

97 Ibid., p. 190.

98 Ibid., p. 92.

99 Private communication, 4 November 2008.

100 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, pp. 298–299, Footnote 4.

101 Ibid., p. 165, citing George Lardner, Jr., ‘‘FBI Says Its Spy in KGB was a Fake,’’ Washington Post, 3 September 1981.

102 Tennent H. Bagley, Spy Wars, p. 190.

103 Ibid., p. 187.

104 John Limon Hart, The CIA’s Russians, pp. 154, 159.

105 For the Curveball case, see Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007). Regarding al-Balawi, see Joby Warrick, ‘‘In new video, CIA bomber says he lured targets with doctored intelligence,’’ Washington Post, 1 March, 2010. See also, Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2011).