False-defector Nosenko's "most important thing" . . .
In his 2007 book, Spy Wars, Tennent H. Bagley wrote the following about his first of five encounters with KGB false defector Yuri Nosenko in 1962 in Geneva:
"[…] Because there's so little time today, I'd like you to tell me what you think is the most important thing you have to tell us."
Nosenko thought for a moment, looking down at the near-empty glass of whiskey and soda that I had served him. "I know the most important American spy the KGB ever recruited in Moscow," he said.
Bingo! I leaned forward as he paused for effect.
"He was a sergeant in your Embassy, a cipher machine mechanic. He had the code name 'Andrey.' I never knew his true name. He got involved with a Russian woman working for us in the Embassy's apartments. The old thing -- it usually works-well, you know ..." He paused expectantly and I nodded. He went on. "We took compromising pictures and he cooperated to get them back and save his marriage."
"A tremendously valuable source," he added, "In fact, my boss went himself all the way to the United States just to reactivate 'Andrey' after the rezidentura lost contact with him."
"Who was that who went?" I asked. He was referring to the man for whom Nosenko had been deputy until just before coming here, the chief of KGB operations against our Moscow Embassy.
"Kovshuk, Vladislav Kovshuk," Nosenko answered.
"Can you tell me anything more, that might help us identify the sergeant? When was he recruited?"
He twisted his wrist in the air, "1949 or 1950. One or the other."
. . . . . . .
My comments:
Nosenko’s putative boss was Vladislav Kovshuk, the head of the KGB’s American Embassy section in Moscow. His job was kept open for him when he went to Washington in January 1957, ostensibly on a two-year gig as a diplomat. He returned to Moscow after only ten months, though, and although “Andrey’s” phone number and address were listed in the phone book, he waited until October to recontact the low-level former cypher machine mechanic.
By putting together Bagley’s observations with John M. Newman’s more recent observations in his dedicated-to-Bagley 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, we now know that Kovshuk’s real reason for coming to the U.S. was to contact KGB’s probable “mole” in the CIA, Bruce Solie, and to be convinced by him in secret meetings in Washington movie houses that GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov was spying for the CIA.
It turns out that Edward Ellis Smith, Popov’s former inept dead drop setter-upper whom Kovshuk had recruited in Moscow and who had been ostensibly fired by the CIA on suspicion of being a “mole,” wasn’t, contrary to what Bagley believed, the person whom Kovshuck had come to the U.S. to meet with, but just reconnoitered the movie houses for Solie and Kovshuk.
As Bagley puts it in Spy Wars:
“Andrey” was the Soviet code name for an American sergeant, cipher-machine mechanic in Moscow from autumn 1951 to autumn 1953, The KGB recruited him just before he returned to the United States but did not recontact him until October 1957. The two KGB officers who then met him in the Washington area, one of whom was Vladislav Kovshuk, recognized that he had no access to secrets, [as suggested by the fact that] the KGB never met with him again. Then, six months after “Andrey” had left the army, Yuri Nosenko exposed him (falsely) as the target of Kovshuk’s 1957 trip to Washington, about which CIA had just learned from the defector Anatoliy Golitsyn. In 1964 Nosenko gave different data that finally made it possible to identify ”Andrey” as Sergeant Dayle W. Smith, whom the CIA and FBI declined to prosecute because he had done no real damage to the nation’s security.
Bottom line: false-defector Nosenko, realizing that recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn must know about Kovshuk’s ten-month stay in the U.S. (but not knowing why he had come) grossly overexaggerated the importance of “Andrey” and the timing of Kovshuk’s meeting with him in order to obfuscate the true reason for his coming to the U.S. in early 1957 — to meet with KGB “mole” Bruce Solie so that Solie could betray CIA’s spy Pyotr Popov to him twenty months before he (Popov) was secretly arrested in Moscow and “played back” against the CIA.
The reason it took the KGB twenty months to do this was because, in order to protect Solie, it first had to create an elaborate surveillance-based scenario in which Popov could eventually be publicly arrested in October of 1959.