Was Len McCoy a KGB mole?

In 1966, CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division’s Reports & Requirements officer Leonard V. McCoy wrote a five-page “memo for the record” that criticized the Division’s having determined that “defector” Yuri Nosenko, “volunteers” Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA), Dmitry Polyakov (TOPHAT), and others were, or had been, under KGB control, and excoriated CIA officers Tennent H. Bagley and David E. Murphy for having believed that they were.

Here’s an excerpt from that memo. My comments are in brackets.


The Clandestine Effort Against The USSR

1. The negative positions taken by the [Soviet Bloc Division] continue to dominate and negate our efforts to collect intelligence on the USSR by clandestine means. In addition, I believe that this negative environment has done permanent damage to our capabilities against the Soviet target, and that this damage increases with each day that this environment prevails.

2. The following is a summary of recent developments in the division’s positions and a list of their effects as I see them.

a. Soviet Bloc Division: “Nosenko is a deception agent, and Soviet deception operations revolve around him.”

The psychiatrist [John Gittinger] has told the [Soviet Bloc Division] that Nosenko’s desperation to change his [incarceration and harsh interrogation] situation may lead to a false confession. The dishonesty and bias in the case against Nosenko are still evident in the current review of his bona fides, according to the officer [Bagley] who is doing most of the writing of that paper. […]

b. Soviet Bloc Division: “BOURBON [Polyakov] is a deception agent.”

I believe that BOURBON [aka TOPHAT] is bona fide [he was, but only since 1965 or so]. He has just made his seventh identification of a major Soviet agent in the U.S. (Boeckenhaupt), who is the fourth such agent who was active, unsuspected, and in the position to do the U.S. serious damage. Any attempt to develop and disseminate BOURBON’s information is inevitably blocked by the counterintelligence emphasis, as well as failure to provide the case officer [Jim Flint] with close substantive support. BOURBON is providing some significant information which is within his access and appears valid. Unwarranted and dishonest judgements of BOURBON’s information are made without the knowledge of [Soviet Bloc Division] officers qualified to make such judgements. The officers of the division’s GRU branch disagree with the division’s evaluation of BOURBON. The paper on BOURBON’s bona fides is being dictated by them to the division chief [David E. Murphy].

c. Soviet Bloc Division: “SCOTCH [Kulak, aka FEDORA] is a deception agent.”

SCOTCH continues to provide requirements and information which I believe to be reliable and appropriate for his access. His information is such that it does not permit a firm conclusion about his bona fides one way or the other, but his counterintelligence information is the best basis for judging him. All important Soviet agents arrested in the U.S. in the past five years or so have been compromised by Nosenko (Robert Lee Johnson and James Mintgenbaugh), by BOURBON (Dunlap, William Whalen, Thompson, Howell, Cassidy, Nelson Drummond, and Boeckenhaupt, and by SCOTCH (Butenko and others unknown to me). I believe that SCOTCH has proven himself in the Counterintelligence field, but the case for him is not so foolproof as for the other two [Nosenko and Polyakov]. Even so, his bona fides or lack of same has no bearing on Nosenko and BOURBON.

. . . . . . .

My comments:

Regarding those poor souls whom McCoy mentions, above, in his 2007 book, Spy Wars, Tennent H. Bagley wrote":

Robert Lee Johnson was an American army sergeant who for money provided the KGB with top secret U.S. Air Force documents he smuggled out during his night duty shift at Orly Airport near Paris. By late 1962 or early 1963 Johnson had lost access to any classified information, and his wife was telling friends he was a Soviet spy. The KGB dropped contact in 1963. Yuri Nosenko uncovered his treason in February 1964. Johnson was arrested, tried, and sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. As for James Mintenbaugh, he was an army officer who had been recruited to spy for the KGB by Johnson. Due to their ties Mintenbaugh would have been uncovered quickly, but had already turned himself into the FBI by the time Johnson was arrested.

My comment: As pertains to Polyakov, this is what Bagley wrote on page 298 of Spy Wars (slightly paraphrased by me in first part of the first sentence):

On page 206 in his book Cold Warrior, Tom Mangold [whose main source was probable “mole” Leonard V. McCoy] named “important” GRU spies uncovered by [GRU Colonel] Polyakov in his first year of cooperation (i.e., late 1961 through 1962). In reality, all had been previously known or were dead cases, or were falsely attributed to Polyakov. U.S. army Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whalen had been under FBI suspicion and surveillance since 1959, suffered a heart attack in 1960, retired from the army in 1961, and was of no further use to the Soviets by the time Polyakov “uncovered” him — an ideal subject for KGB sacrifice. Similarly, army Sergeant Jack Dunlap, once an important source of communications secrets, had failed a polygraph test, retired from the service, and lost all access to secrets just before he was fingered to the Americans. The British Air Ministry employee Frank Bossard was actively spying for the GRU when uncovered — but was uncovered by another source, Nikolay Chernov, FBI codename “Nicknack.” Airforce Sergeant Herbert W. Boeckenhaupt did not begin spying for the GRU until June 1965, and he did so in Germany while Polyakov was stationed in Burma.

My comment: I don’t know to whom McCoy was referring when he mentioned “Thompson,” “Howell,” and “Cassidy.” The only thing Bagley says about Nelson Drummond is that he was one of many American KGB/GRU agents who were *not* uncovered due to poor tradecraft or by superior CIA/FBI surveillance, but by other KGB/GRU agents. To read an excellent article on Drummond, google ”Red Scare: The Sensational Trial of US-Russian Spy Nelson C. Drummond.”

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Leonard V. McCoy was a Reports & Requirement officer in the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division. As such he was responsible for analyzing the incoming reports of KGB defectors and double agents, and for formulating questions to ask those folks.

Pete Bagley wrote the following about McCoy in 2014. I’ve inserted my comments in brackets. Note: You can read-for-free Bagley’s 2014 35-page PDF “Ghosts of the Spy Wars” by googling simultaneously “ghosts of the spy wars” and “archive”. You can likewise read-for-free his 2007 Yale University Press book, “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games,” by googling “spy wars” and ‘archive” simultaneously.

. . . . . . .

Bagley:

The Soviet Bloc Reports & Requirements officer who started the process [of “clearing” KGB false defector Yuri Nosenko], Leonard McCoy, was later made deputy chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff (under a new Counterintelligence Staff chief [George Kalaris], previously unconnected with anti-Soviet operations, who had replaced James Angleton). There, he continued fiercely to defend Nosenko's bona fides and, in the guise of cleansing unnecessary old files, destroyed all the Counterintelligence Staff's existing file material that (independent of Soviet Bloc Division's own findings) cast doubt on Nosenko's good faith.

Not until forty-five years later was McCoy's [December 1965] appeal declassified and released by the National Archives (NARA) on 12 March 2012 under the JFK Act “with no objection from CIA.”

Note: You can read McCoy’s 40-page appeal at www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10095-10151.pdf

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 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.

. . . . . . .

Bagley later writes:

In order to discredit circumstantial evidence, one must have some reasonable alternative explanation for it. To justify such faith in Nosenko [as McCoy had], 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 Oswald in 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 that name, 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 SCD.

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?

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)

f. 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)

A final couple of questions:

41. 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)

. . . . . . .

My comment:

Why did McCoy so fiercely defend the patently false KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko?

Was he totally incompetent, or was he a KGB “mole”?

If the latter, was he protecting James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Solie, from being uncovered?