Was Bruce Leonard Solie a KGB Mole?

This was my proposed Wikipedia article on probable KGB "mole" Bruce Solie at the heart of the CIA who, like Kim Philby, duped Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton . . . and who probably visited Philby in Beirut in 1957 to learn how to do it.

Wikipedia rejected the article because, in so many words, “not enough well-known writers have written about him.”

LOL

. . . . . . .

Bruce Leonard Solie was a commendation-garnering[1], career-long officer in the CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security who was best known for his de facto exoneration of controversial KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, his uncovering of Igor Orlov as Anatoliy Golitsyn's "mole," "Sasha," and his involvement in the tragic Nicholas Shadrin / "Kitty Hawk" case.[2][3][4][5] In addition to effectively being CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's mole-hunting superior, Solie was, like KGB "mole" Kim Philby, his highly trusted confidant and mentor.[6] Described as "dour, plodding, risk-averse, and ultra-cautious"[7] by former high-level CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley, Solie nevertheless may have sent President John F. Kennedy's accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for a KGB "mole" (Solie?) in the wrong part of the CIA.[8]

Bagley, who was Nosenko's primary case officer for five years, came to suspect near the end of his life that Solie was a KGB "mole," and suggested that Solie be "put on the short list" for the fact that his sister-in-law had (allegedly) married Nosenko, and because Solie had inexplicably provided "rock-like protection" for Nosenko over the years.[9]

Researcher and former high-level Army Intelligence analyst John M. Newman and his British colleague Malcolm Blunt (who befriended Bagley in 2008 after Bagley had retired in Brussels, Belgium), contend that Solie probably was, for the reasons outlined above and below, a KGB "mole" at the heart of the CIA.[10][11]

Background

Solie was born to a dairy farmer and his wife in Wisconsin on November 12th, 1917, and he died on December 23rd, 1992. He became a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, and met his future wife (Mary Elizabeth Matthews) during WW II at Rosecrans Field (known today as Rosecrans Air National Guard Base) in St. Joseph, Missouri. They were married on February 22, 1944, and lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and Homestead, Florida, until Solie was stationed overseas as a bomber pilot. They eventually had a son and two daughters. At the conclusion of WW II, they moved to "Badger Village," a housing facility devised to handle the influx of WWII veterans attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from which school he earned degrees in economics and law. In 1951 they relocated to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he began a career with the CIA which lasted until his retirement in 1979.

Indications that Solie was a KGB "Mole"

Travel Records

Researcher Newman found some of Solie's travel records which had been posted on a genealogical website in 2010. Since he was told by his publisher that they were too faint, they weren't included in his 2022 book, "Uncovering Popov's Mole," but were put on his website, instead. ( https://jfkjmn. com/ ; click on "Uncovering Popov's Mole -- Supplement" on the home page.) They indicate that Solie, not known to have been on official business at the time, flew to Beirut, Lebanon, in February of 1957, six months after Kim Philby had moved there, and that he visited Paris twice within one month in 1962 -- just before Nosenko walked into the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, and on the last day that Nosenko met with Bagley and Russia-born George Kisevalter there. Newman believes Solie visited Philby in Beirut to learn from him how to control Angleton, and that his close-together visits to Paris were to meet with some KGB operatives so that they could convey to Nosenko's case officer in Moscow, Oleg Gribanov, what a recent true-defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling Angleton (and Angleton was confiding to Solie) about possible KGB penetrations of U.S and other NATO countries' intelligence services. Newman believes Solie's subsequent visit to Paris was to inform those same "moles" and a high-level KGB officer by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal what he had learned about Bagley's and Kisevalter's interactions with Nosenko in Geneva.[12]

"Popov's Mole" / The Lee Harvey Oswald Defection Case

In April of 1958, CIA's spy, GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov, allegedly told his CIA handler, George Kisevalter, in West Berlin that he had recently heard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin knew all of the technical specifications of the CIA's Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Solie and CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, decided to initiate a "mole hunt" for the leaker of the intel, ostensibly presumed by Solie to be in CIA's headquarters in the Soviet Russia Division.[13]

Newman, having determined by the time he published his 1995 book, "Oswald and the CIA," that many of the CIA's documents on Lee Harvey Oswald had disappeared for several years into a "black hole" in the Agency,[14] eventually realized that all of the incoming non-CIA cables about the defection had been arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to be routed to Solie's mole-hunting Staff Research Branch office in the Office of Security rather than where they would have normally gone, the Soviet Russia Division. This led Newman to conclude that Solie must have known ahead of time that Oswald was going to defect to the USSR, which in turn forced him to conclude that Solie was a KGB "mole," and that he had sent (or duped Angleton into sending) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA.[15] Newman and many other experts say this "mole hunt" (and the hunt for Golitsyn's mole "Sasha"; see below) lasted several years and tore the Soviet Russia Division and Angleton's Counterintelligence department apart.

Although the CIA had received a cable about Oswald's defection from the Department of the Navy on 4 November 1959, Solie, when asked on that date by the FBI's liaison to the CIA, Sam Papich, if the Agency knew anything about Oswald, wrote to Angleton's Counterintelligence liaison, "Mr. Papich was advised that we had no info on subject."[16]

The Sasha Case

KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in Helsinki, Finland. Four days after he arrived in the U.S., he told Solie that, based on what he had surreptitiously read in a KGB file in Moscow ten years earlier, there was a "mole" in the CIA whose codename was "Sasha" (the Slavic nickname for "Alexander"), that he had served in U.S. Intelligence in West Germany, and that his name started with a "K" and ended in "-ski" or "-sky."[17] Solie showed Golitsyn a list of CIA agents and officers whose name started with a "K" and ended with a Slavic suffix like "-ski" or "-sky." The list evidently didn't include the name Alexander Kopatzky, an earlier name of Igor Orlov, a Russia-born CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in West Germany after WW II, and whose agents were often uncovered by the KGB in the USSR, so Golitsyn chose the name "Peter Klibanski" (the original name of Peter Karlow) from the list, instead.[18] Karlow, who was already under suspicion of being a "mole" because he had directed the leak-plagued top-secret "Easy Chair" electronic-listening project and had managed several agents who had been caught by the KGB, was summarily fired from the CIA. Karlow was later cleared of suspicion of being "Sasha" and financially compensated for his troubles. The aforementioned Igor Orlov / Alexander Kopatzky, who had been forced to retire from the CIA in 1961 when he and his wife moved to the U.S., was belatedly deemed by Solie in 1965 to be Golitsyn's mole, "Sasha," and this identification was confirmed by controversial KGB defector Igor Kochnov in 1966, thereby enhancing both his and Solie's reputations with the CIA and the FBI.[19]

The Yuri Nosenko Case

In late May or early June (accounts vary) of 1962, putative KGB officer Yuri Nosenko "walked in to” the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland and offered to exchange some KGB intelligence for $250 of "desperately needed" funds. Tennent H. Bagley flew in from Bern and met with Nosenko one-on-one in a CIA "safe house," and they were joined two days later by Russia-born agent-handler George Kisevalter. There were five meetings altogether, and during the final one on 15 June, Solie showed up unannounced, hoping to show Nosenko a list of suspected "moles" in the CIA. Bagley, who had already become Nosenko's primary case officer, didn't allow Solie to meet with Nosenko, but did let him sit in the next room and pass questions to him. Bagley has said that Nosenko "drew a blank" on all of the names that were presented to him, and that he later learned that the names were leads recent KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had given to the CIA.[20] Solie flew to Paris for the second time in six months that same day, and Nosenko, who was ostensibly serving as the security officer for a Soviet arms negotiation delegation, flew back to Moscow with it the next day.[21]

Nosenko recontacted Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in late January 1964, two months after the assassination of JFK. Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he wanted to physically defect to the U.S., now, and leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves, because he suspected that the KGB was aware of his treason. Nosenko then claimed that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in the USSR, and that he therefore knew for a fact that the KGB hadn't even interviewed the "abnormal" former Marine radar operator during the two-and-one-half-years he lived there. When he told Bagley and Kisevalter a few days later that he had just received a recall telegram from Moscow, CIA headquarters gave Bagley and Kisevalter permission to take him to Frankfurt, West Germany so that he could be processed for possible entry into the U.S. Once Nosenko was actually in the U.S., he refused to cooperate fully with his Agency debriefers.[22] After being taken by Bagley to Hawaii on a two-week vacation, Nosenko was detained in April in a Maryland "safe house" by the CIA and subjected to polygraph exams and hostile interrogations.[23]

That same month, April 1964, Solie tried to convince Warren Commission investigator W. David Slawson that Nosenko had given contradictory information to his debriefers because he had been drunk at his five 1962 meetings in Geneva, there had been a severe language problem between himself and Bagley, and because he was under intense stress in the US. British researcher Malcolm Blunt, who befriended Bagley in 2008, says Bagley was astounded when Blunt showed him some documents which suggested Solie had tried to convince Slawson that Nosenko was a true defector, and Bagley and Blunt agreed that April 1964 was much too early for Solie to have arrived at that conclusion.

For security reasons Nosenko was moved from the residential-area "safe house" to a more austere, bunker-like building that was built especially for him at Camp Peary, and he was subjected there to two more years of hostile (but not tortuous) interrogations and another polygraph exam.

In 1967, Solie was given the task of conducting a new, independent investigation to determine whether or not still-incarcerated Nosenko was a true defector. To do this, he moved Nosenko into a more comfortable "safe house," and proceeded to elicit from him explanations that could make more-plausible his previous contradictory statements. A year later, after administering a final polygraph exam to Nosenko (which polygraph expert Robert O. Arther later read at CIA headquarters and said was unreliable [24]) Solie, contradicting the negative assessment of Nosenko by the Soviet Russia Division's 450-page condensation of Bagley's 840-page report, concluded in his report that Nosenko was a true defector. This conclusion was quickly accepted by CIA leadership, and Nosenko was released, "cleared," financially compensated, resettled under a new name, and hired by the CIA to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.[25]

The Igor Kochnov / KITTY HAWK / Shadrin Affair

In June of 1966, shortly before he assumed the position of Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms received a phone call at home from Washington-based KGB officer Igor Kochnov. Kochnov told Helms he was willing to spy for the CIA on the condition that the Agency would help boost his status in Moscow by pretending to turn over to him Nicholas Shadrin (original name Artamonov), a former Soviet destroyer captain who had defected to the U.S. several years earlier. Helms and Angleton, believing Kochnov to be a "plant" and still fearing that the Soviet Russia Division was penetrated by a KGB "mole," decided to "play" Kochnov back against the Soviets, and turned him over, for handling, to Solie from the Office of Security and FBI agent Albert "Bert" Turner. Before Kochnov returned to Moscow a few months later, never to return to the U.S., he turned Shadrin over to another KGB officer at the Soviet embassy. Angleton warned Solie to never let Shadrin leave the country out of fear that he would be kidnapped or killed by the KGB, but Solie soon allowed him to travel to Canada in an espionage intrigue, and in 1975 permitted him (and his wife) to travel to Vienna, Austria so he could meet with Kochnov. Due to the failure of Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and Cynthia Hausmann to provide counter-surveillance for the meeting, Shadrin was kidnapped by the KGB and he died, according to Oleg Kalugin, when he was he was given too much chloroform to render him unconscious while being transported to Czecholovakia by car. According to Henry Hurt's 1980 book, "Shadrin: The Spy Who Didn't Come Back, Solie, dour and non-apologetic, accompanied Mrs. Shadrin back to the U.S.

The Clay Shaw Trial

In a 2022 YouTube video in which researcher Malcolm Blunt is interviewed about Yuri Nosenko, Blunt says Solie was omnipresent in the JFK assassination investigation, and that he was "all over" Clay Shaw for New Orlean's District Attorney Jim Garrison. [26]

References

Heuer, Richards J., Jr. (1987). "Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgement". Yumpu.

Epstein, Edward Jay (1978). Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. New York, N.Y.: Reader's Digest Press / McGraw-Hill Book Company. p. 266. ISBN 0-07-019539-0.

Wise, David (1992). Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA. New York, N.Y.: Random House. p. 190. ISBN 0-394-58514-3.

Ashley, Clarence (2004). CIA SpyMaster. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company. p. 286. ISBN 1-58980-234-9.

Mangold, Tom (1991). Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton. Glasgow, Great Britain: Simon & Schuster. p. 54. ISBN 0-671-69930-X.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. pp. 45–46, 332, 336, 378–379. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. p. 406. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. pp. Frontispiece. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. U.S.A.: Self-published. pp. 3–6, 405–406. ISBN 9798355050771.

Dale, Alan (2020). The Devil Is In The Details: Alan Dale With Malcolm Blunt On The Assassination Of President Kennedy. U.S.A.: Independently published. pp. 393–397. ISBN 9798553486631.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. p. 3. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (1995). Oswald and the CIA. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, Publishers, Inc. pp. 24–28. ISBN 0-7867-0131-5.

Newman, John M. (2022). Uncovering Popov's Mole. United States: Self-published. ISBN 9798355050771.

Newman, John M. (1995). Oswald and the CIA. New York, N.Y.: Carroll &Graf Publishers, Inc. pp. 20, 442. ISBN 0-7867-0131-5.

Mangold, Tom (1991). Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton. Great Britain: Simon & Schuster. p. 54. ISBN 0-671-69930-X.

House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations Subcommittee on John F. Kennedy (October 5, 1978). "Testimony of Mr. James Angleton". archive.org.

Bagley, Tennent H. (2007). Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. pp. 198–201. ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.

Bagley, Tennent H. (2007). Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.

Bagley, Tennent H. (2007). Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.

Bagley, Tennent H. (2007). Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. pp. 92–101. ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.

Bagley, Tennent H. (2007). Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. pp. 183–194. ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.

Select Committee on Assassinations U.S., House of Representatives Ninety-fifth Congress, Second Session (1979). "The Analysis of Yuri Nosenko's Polygraph Examination" (PDF). history-matters.com.

Robarge, David (2013). "DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" (PDF). nsarchive2.gwu.edu.

Blunt, Malcolm (2021). "JFK Assassination - Malcolm Blunt - Episode 3 - Yuri Nosenko - Sep 10, 2021". YouTube.