CIA's official historian, David Robarge, is all wet.

Here’s an excerpt from a 20-page article CIA’s official historian, David Robarge, wrote in 2005 about the CIA’s reaction to the JFK Assassination.

One wonders if he has, since then, read Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (which you can read for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously), W. Alan Messer’s 2013 article, “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle: The Nosenko Theories Revisited,” and the parts about Bruce Solie, Yuri Nosenko, and Oleg Gribanov, et al., in John M. Newman’s 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole.

My comments are in brackets.

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The documentary record does not indicate what Director of CIA John McCone knew about the austere conditions of [Yuri] Nosenko's year-long [beginning in April 1964] detention at an Agency safehouse. (Twelve of the sixteen months of the Russian's confinement there were during McCone's tenure.)

[Former CIA officer Richard] Helms does not recall that McCone ever asked for details of the inquiry, and the DCI does not appear to have been fully aware of much of the dubious logic [What dubious logic?] and inappropriate procedures [inappropriate procedures?] upon which the case against Nosenko rested. Assured by his senior operations and legal officers that the Agency was handling Nosenko lawfully and in ways they believed stood the best chance of revealing the truth, McCone let the hostile [but not tortuous] interrogation run its course. There is no reason to doubt that he would have accepted then the argument Helms made to congressional investigators a decade-and-a-half later to justify the severe [have I said “but not tortuous”?] treatment of Nosenko:

This became one of the most difficult issues that the Agency had ever faced. Here a President of the United States [JFK] had been murdered, and a man [Nosenko] had come from the Soviet Union, an acknowledged Soviet intelligence officer, and said his intelligence service had never been in touch with this man [Oswald] and knew nothing about him. This strained credulity at the time. It strains it to this day. ... You are damned if you hold a follow too long and treat him badly and you are damned the other way if you have not dug his teeth out to find out what he knows about Oswald.

McCone soon received further impressions about Nosenko from the FBI and [KGB true defector Anatoliy] Golitsyn that reinforced his approval for having the defector interrogated. In May 1964, the FBI's liaison officer to the Agency, Sam Papich, told McCone that some Bureau officials "are very much concerned and recognize that [Nosenko] could be a plant." "[H]is story has held up — but the cases are peanuts, no real significance. The other leads that he gave us-many of them were known to us .... [The Soviets] have not suffered at all by what he's given us." McCone told Papich that CIA would not decide on Nosenko one way or the other unless the Bureau agreed with its judgment. In June, Golitsyn — after reading files on Nosenko and listening to tapes of his debriefings — reaffirmed his prior assessment that Nosenko was a false defector.

In July [1964], Golitsyn told the DCI that he disputed Nosenko's explanation of GRU asset Pyotr Popov's arrest in 1959. Nosenko said KGB security caught a CIA officer [George Winters] mailing a letter to Popov. Golitsyn insisted, however, that Nosenko's account was intended to divert the Agency from the penetration agent [probably Bruce Solie in the Office of Security] who had tipped off the Soviets [specifically to high-level KGB officer Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington D C movie houses in early 1957]. The Warren Commission's patience with the Agency over Nosenko had worn thin by mid-June, when it asked McCone for a definitive assessment of Nosenko's credibility. McCone had Helms tell Chief Justice Warren that CIA thought Nosenko might be a dispatched agent and to advise the commission that his information should be suppressed.

One important concern the Agency had was the embarrassment that would result if the commission's report included material from a source [Kremlin-loyal triple agent Aleksei Kulak at the FBI’s NYC field office] later shown to be a controlled Soviet agent. Warren later told McCone that the commission had accepted CIA's advice. In addition, at least three times in July, Agency officers (including Helms, Murphy, and Bagley) told the commission that Nosenko might be a KGB plant. Those sessions settled the question; the FBI's debriefings of Nosenko remained closed in the commission's files and did not contribute to its conclusions.

During the last 12 months of McCone's directorship, CIA officers subjected Nosenko to at least 160 hours of hostile [but not tortuous] interrogation and an untallied amount of what was termed ''neutral" questioning. According to Helms, the DCI did not follow the case closely at this stage but expected to be informed of major developments. Otherwise, once the Warren Commission formally concluded that Oswald had acted alone, McCone showed no further interest in pursuing the Nosenko aspect of the assassination.

Meanwhile, the case remained unbroken. [But only just. At one point in 1964, Nosenko, caught in a lie, fell into a trance-like state and muttered to himself, “If I admit I wasn’t watching [American Embassy Security Officer John] Abidian, then I’d have to admit that I’m not George [Yuri], that I wasn’t born in Nikolayev, and that I’m not married.”]

In January 1965, CIA determined that Nosenko — who had not changed his story about Oswald and the KGB — was being deceptive but still could not ascertain why. When McCone left Langley, the Office of Security had nearly completed preparations for placing Nosenko in a specially built detention facility. The US Intelligence Board Executive Committee approved this phase of the Agency's handling of Nosenko, although it was not given details of the defector's treatment. There is no record that McCone knew or asked about the mechanics of this much more grueling (and ultimately fruitless) phase of the investigation.

As journalist David Wise pointed out in the late I 970s, there were several permutations to the question of Nosenko's authenticity, most of which were not considered by McCone or any senior Agency officer after the Kennedy assassination. First, as conventional wisdom at CIA ran until the late 1960s, Nosenko could have been a false detector with a false story about Oswald and the KGB. Second, [as proposed by former CIA officer W. Allen Messer in his 2013 article “In Pursuit of the Squared Circle”], Nosenko might have been a real defector [in 1964] who had made up a story about Oswald to make himself a "bigger catch." [My emphasis.] The inaccuracies and exaggerations in his story were reevaluated later as consistent with the penchant of defectors to embellish their biographies, access, and knowledge. Third, Nosenko could have been a genuine defector with accurate information. The FBI believed Nosenko [because he was exonerating J. Edgar Hoover by saying Oswald wasn’t a KGB agent] in 1964, and [a probable KGB “mole” in the] CIA [by the name of Bruce Solie] concluded a few years later [via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report] that his information about Oswald was accurate. Lastly, Nosenko might have been a controlled agent sent to the United States to report truthfully that the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald or the assassination. Moscow miscalculated, however, in thinking the US government would find that story more believable if it came through clandestine channels from a "defector" with an attractive resume.

As DCI, McCone never freed himself from the "zero sum" paradigm. to which SR Division and the Cl Staff were wedded: Golitsyn was good, so Nosenko must be bad. The empirically minded McCone judged that enough facts existed to support that deceptively simple conclusion. As in other counterintelligence matters — an area in which he did not display much intellectual creativity — he deferred to trusted deputies. In 1978, McCone told the House assassinations committee that he thought Nosenko was bona fide after all. He did not say what led him to that conclusion, but he may have been reflecting the Agency's revised [in 1968 by probable KGB “mole” Bruce Solie] view of Nosenko. Reliable KGB information [LOL!!!] shows that both defectors were genuine — an apparently elementary conclusion that intellectual rigidity and bureaucratic obstinacy kept McCone and a significant number of senior Agency officers from reaching.

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Here’s a short review of Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, that Robarge wrote in 2009:

The CIA operations officer who had the dubious fortune of handling Nosenko has written a combative and sometimes confusing [not if you read the book two or three times] rebuttal to the criticisms of how Angleton and others approached that case — the presumption [sic; assumption] that Nosenko was a false defector dispatched to discredit Golitsyn and assert that the KGB had nothing to do with the JFK assassination. Bagley denies the oft-repeated charge that he initially believed Nosenko was bona fide [not true; see my comment below] but then fell under Angleton’s and Golitsyn’s sway and embraced their conspiratorial world view that would later be called “sick think” [by HSCA perjurer John L. Hart and others]. Instead, in a detailed and often hard-to-follow case review [As I alluded, above, the subject matter is so complicated that you’ll probably have to read it at least twice to get a handle on it], Bagley insists that Nosenko’s first contact with CIA in 1962 was designed to conceal the presence of Soviet penetration agents [particularly Bruce Leonard Solie, Angleton’s confidant, mentor and mole-hunting boss in the Office of Security according to John M. Newman in his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole] who had been operating in US intelligence since at least the late 1950s and that his reappearance barely two months after the JFK murder was a risky change in the operation. Bagley unsparingly [Good!] attacks the defector’s defenders, whom he believes [Believes? LOL! Read Bagley’s 1978 HSCA testimony (under the name “Mr. D.C.” as in Deputy Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division) in which he rips the CIA’s official defender of Nosenko and slanderer of Bagley — John L. Hart — the proverbial “new one”] have besmirched his own reputation, and he has challenged them to answer 20 questions about the case, claiming that a “no” to any one of them would be enough to discredit Nosenko and substantiate Angleton’s view that the defector was dispatched. Critics of Spy Wars have noted Bagley’s reliance on unnamed former KGB officers as sources for essential (some would say convenient) information [Bagley’s main KGB source, General Sergei Kondrashev, was still alive in 2007, and maybe, just maybe, some of his other KGB sources had spoken with him in confidence?].

My comments:

1) Hey Robarge, . . . aww never mind.

2) On pages 23 - 27 in Spy Wars, Bagley describes how he, convinced that Nosenko was a true defector, met with Angleton (at Angleton’s request) at CIA headquarters a few days after he and (probable “mole”) George Kisevalter had finished interviewing Nosenko in Geneva in June 1962. He describes how Angleton gave him the thick, top-secret file of a recent defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and suggested that he read it. While reading it in private for three days and nights, Bagley realized that what Nosenko had told himself and Kisevalter a few days earlier implausibly overlapped (and contradicted) what Golitsyn had told Angleton six months earlier — implausible because Nosenko claimed to have worked in a different section of the highly compartmentalized KGB than Golitsyn.

3) Here’s an excerpt from those pages in Spy Wars:

The morning after my final night of study, after long reflection that had left me little sleep, I went back to Angleton.

"Thanks, Jim. You were right. I needed this information. But at the same time, I’ve got to tell you something. We may have a problem.”

I told him about the curious coincidences and persistent overlapping of the two men’s reports. Jim frowned, thought for a moment, shook his head and said, “Please jot down these points for me. I want to look carefully at this.”

The next day I gave Bertha [Angleton’s secretary] an envelope with my handwritten list of the most significant fourteen points of parallel reporting. I could have listed more, but it did not seem worth mentioning the many events and people that both sources had reported but that any two KGB officers could be expected to know.

That afternoon Jim called me back to his office.

“You may be on to something here,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Golitsyn himself said he expected the KGB to make some effort to divert the leads he could give us. Maybe that’s what we’ve got on our hands now.”

We agreed that there wasn’t enough data to make a case and that Nosenko was to be handled as if there were no doubts.

“Just leave this with me,” Jim said. “We can look deeper into it when you come on duty [in his new position as Chief of the Soviet Russia Division’s Counterintelligence Department] this fall.” He shook his head and added, "Pity. You’d be in for a medal for this, but that wouldn’t be appropriate in this new light, would it?”

Indeed, it would not. I shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.”

Jim tossed another pencil aside and stood to shake hands. "Meanwhile, let’s not tell anyone else about this problem.”

“I have to tell Jack [Maury*],” I said.

"Of course.”

*Note — John Maury was Bagley’s boss in the Soviet Russia Division.

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Evidently Robarge needs to read Spy Wars again . . . if he ever read it the first time, that is.