John Sipher says I'm wrong.

The Cipher Brief’s John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the CIA who helped uncover Robert Hanssen and was CIA’s Station Chief in Serbia and Moscow, has told me that he thinks my theory that Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and George Kisevalter were probably moles is “ridiculous.” “There has been nothing to substantiate those claims,” he said, “and the CIA was able to continue recruiting spies in Russian intelligence services.”

Here’s my reply:

Dear John,

I’m afraid you’re mistaken about probable mole Solie and his supporting actors, McCoy and Kisevalter.

The circumstantial evidence against Solie — who was father-figure-requiring James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior — is overwhelming.

Solie:

1) Inexplicably travelled to Beirut, home of Kim Philby, in April 1957, soon after Lt. Col. Vladislav Kovshuk had come to Washington as a “diplomat” on an ostensible two-year gig.

Factoids:

Kovshuk returned to Moscow and his reserved-for-him job after only ten months. He had not, as false defector Nosenko claimed to Bagley in June 1962, made a short trip to D.C. to recontact cipher machine mechanic “Andrey,” whom Bagley tells us turned out to be burnt out Army Seargent Dayle W. Smith, but to form, with KGB officers Guk and “Kislov,” the movie house-frequenting trio that the FBI came to call “The Three Musketeers” and to meet in said movie houses with Edward Ellis Smith (or Bruce Solie) regarding CIA’s spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov.

Smith had been Popov’s incompetent dead drop setter-upper in Moscow, and Solie would have known about Popov through his liaison with McCoy and Kisevalter — and he had access to the U-2’s secrets in the Office of Security.

Smith had been honey-trapped and recruited by Kovshuk in late 1956. He belatedly told Ambassador Bohlen that he’d been compromised but not recruited. He was escorted to Washington by James McCord of future Watergate notoriety, interrogated, and fired by the State Department and the Agency. While hanging around Washington, waiting for a job at the Hoover Institution to open up, Smith bumped into a CIA friend. When he was asked, “What have you been doing?” he answered, “Just killing time, waiting to go out to California. Spending a lot of time in the movies.”

Former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and NSA officer John M. Newman believes Solie visited Philby in Beirut to learn from “the master” how best to manipulate Angleton and prevent him from finding out that he, Solie, had betrayed Popov.

2) apparently arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to have all of the non-CIA cables on Oswald’s upcoming “defection” sent to OS/SRS (where he was Deputy Chief) instead of where they would normally go — the Soviet Russia Division. Those cables, including two that warned that former Marine U-2 radar operator Oswald had threatened to Consul Snyder and the microphones hidden in the walls to commit espionage against the U.S., disappeared into a “black hole.”

3) showed up at the Geneva safehouse on 15 June 1962 to “ask” Nosenko, via Kisevalter and/or Bagley, about the possible KGB penetrations that Golitsyn had told Angleton about and Angleton had naively shared with Solie,

4) pleaded with the Warren Commission’s W. David Slawson in April 1964 to let Nosenko testify to the Commission (even though CI and SRD had serious doubts about his bona fides and he was just beginning to be subjected to hostile (but non-tortuous) interrogations,

5) hid OS documents on Oswald from the HSCA,

6) helped McCoy, Haussman and Bert Turner “lose” Shadrin to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975,

7) “cleared,” in October 1968, false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 Nosenko via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report,

8) was Nosenko’s best man,


Rhetorical question:

Do you think Golitsyn and Angleton crippled CIA’s recruitment of non-dangled KGB and GRU officers?

Pete Bagley says they didn’t.


— Tom