Putative KGB Major I mean Lieutenant-Colonel I mean Captain Yuri Nosenko was “Mega” because so many other KGB false-defectors and Kremlin-loyal double agents “attested” to his being a true defector, and because he protected so many KGB “moles” and triple agents from being uncovered by the CIA and the FBI.
Aside from the fact that Nosenko’s “legend” kept changing over the years and he couldn’t remember if he had joined the KGB before or after Stalin died . . .
His June 1962 innocuous-sounding, non-mole-based explanations for how CIA’s spies Popov and Penkovsly were uncovered or were going to be uncovered not only contradicted what true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had started telling James Angleton six months earlier, but were implausible for the degree of alleged details he gave given the fact that he and Golitsyn had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.
In 1964, Nosenko claimed that his crew saw U.S. Embassy security officer, John Abidian, “set up“ a dead drop in Moscow in late December of 1960, but the only time Abidian was inside the apartment building lobby where the drop was situated was in late December 1961, and it was only to check on it in response to two mysterious voiceless phone calls that approximated the kind of calls Penkovsky had been instructed by one of his former case officers — possible mole George Kisevalter — to make in case of an emergency.
Factoid: Penkovsky had set that “drop” up, himself, before he was recruited by the CIA and MI6 in London in April of 1961.
Also, if Nosenko’s crew’s truly watched Abidian set up a dead drop in December of 1960, it’s implausible that he could have forgotten to bring the subject up in June of 1962 when he was ostensibly defecting-in-place and the existence of such a dead drop would have had a bearing on his own security.
In Geneva in 1962, Nosenko “fished” for information from Bagley (and Kisevalter) regarding a penetration of Soviet intelligence by the name of “Zepp,” whose name, Nosenko bragged, had come up in a “bugged” Moscow dinner conversation between a putative American military attaché and a putative Indonesian military attaché, neither admitting that it was actually a conversation between Penkovsky and his handler, Greville Wynne, nor that had been secretly recorded by a “bug” in an ashtray or vase that was on their table in a Moscow restaurant sixteen months earlier (i.e., two weeks after Penkovsky had been recruited), nor realizing that the person they were talking about wasn’t “Zepp,” but “Zeph,” the nickname of a London bargirl whose name was Stephanie and with whom Penkovsky was smitten at the time.
Meaning what?
Meaning that Penkovsky had been betrayed by a KGB “mole” in American or British intelligence within two weeks of his being recruited, and that the “mole” was so important (like CIA’s Bruce Solie or MI5’s Roger Hollis) that in order to prevent him from being uncovered, Penkovsky’s arrest had to be put off until an elaborate surveillance-based scenario had been set up in Moscow that wouldn’t point a guilty finger at the traitor.
Finally, after being proved during a 1964 interrogation to be ignorant of Abidian’s vacation in Armenia one year, Nosenko, who had claimed in 1962 to have monitored Abidian constantly, “hoping to catch another Popov,” fell into a near-trance and muttered to himself, “If I admit I wasn’t watching 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.”
But then he “pulled himself out of it” and didn’t break.
Rhetorical question: Why has the CIA’s official position since 1969 or so been that Nosenko was a true defector?
Answer: Because that’s what a KGB “mole” (or two or three) in the Agency wanted it to be.
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Tom, one of the first German double agents but not really. Dr Armgaard Karl Graves.
Seems like fake double agents was a "pattern of practice long" ago>>>
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/first-world-war/the-kaisers-spy-in-scotland-naval-espionage-before-the-great-war
Howard, nothing much changes.....................................