The following is an article titled “Yuri Nosenko, CIA,” Leonard V. McCoy’s 1987 review of the BBC film, “Yuri Nosenko, KGB.” It appeared in the Fall 1987 newsletter of CIRA (Central Intelligence Retiree’s Association).

My acerbic comments are in brackets

. . . . . . .

For some of us former CIA officers, the transitory artistic or entertainment value which the film Yuri Nosenko, KGB, admittedly has is poignantly overshadowed by Nosenko's personal tragedy [My comment: There was no personal tragedy; Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in-Geneva-in-June-1962, and a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to support because he was telling the CIA and the FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear — that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with former sharpshooting Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-one-half years he lived in the USSR], arising from CIA's handling of his defection. We cannot look upon this account of Nosenko's first three and a half years in the "Free World" as if it were just another Le Carre episode or an espionage vignette of the Bolshevik era. We may not allow ourselves to forget that this story deals with a living person who chose to leave his Communist homeland at the age of 36 and transfer his loyalty to the U.S. In so doing he became the most valuable [you should have said “most destructive”] defector from the KGB yet to come over to the West (Vitaly [“The Homesick Defector”] Yurchenko, a fellow Ukrainian, may be a close second). To continue to dispute this fact now, 25 years after his initial walk-in, is to take issue with all the Agency Directors and the responsible operators, Counterintelligence and Soviet Division chiefs of the past 20 years. [Yep; they were either duped or they were moles.] More important than that, such a stand flies in the face of the testimony of all the Soviet agents and defectors we have had over the past 25 years [That’s just evidence that Golitsyn’s warnings of a KGB “Master Plan” were correct]. While we don't have the illusion that a commercial movie producer would alter his script to reflect the professional judgments of this formidable array of our [brainwashed or recruited] former superiors and [triple-agent or “doomed-pilot”] Soviet assets, we can no longer ignore the consistently positive assessments of Nosenko by the Agency's series of studies of his case.

The following paragraphs will present a view of the case which has never appeared anywhere else and was ignored by Congressional committees, but which has been borne out by time and fate.

The film's title, to begin with, is a misnomer and may influence the audience subliminally to share the belief that Nosenko not only was, but still is, KGB. It is a misnomer because it is not so much an account of the agony of Nosenko's ordeal from 1964 to 1967 as it is a romanticized version of his case officer's [i.e., Tennent H. Bagley’s] ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prove Nosenko a Soviet deception agent [He did prove it in his 1978 HSCA testimony and in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, but, unfortunately, a probable KGB mole by the name of Bruce Leonard Solie “cleared” him via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report in October 1968]. In contrast to Nosenko's initial case officer, [Tennent H. Bagley] ("Steve Daley" in the film), the [Russia-born] officer [George Kisevalter] who was sent to Geneva to [help] handle Nosenko in 1962 was fluent in Russian [Bagley spoke semi-fluent Russian], a walking encyclopedia on the USSR and our other Soviet operations [so was Bagley], and well-informed on the KGB as Nosenko represented it [Huh?]. He never had any reservations about Nosenko's bona fides, because he knew what to expect of Soviet agents/defectors and instinctively saw through Nosenko's braggadocio and self-serving exaggeration to the solid layer of· counterintelligence gold which lay underneath. [Bagley says in Spy Wars that he winced whenever garrulous and avuncular Kisevalter volunteered intel to Nosenko, and that Kisevalter never gave any sign that he had noticed the contradictions and anomalies popping up in the case.]

Before addressing the realities of this case, a few words should be devoted to the reviewer's critique [to which McCoy is responding, here] of its technical aspects. The reviewer draws on the TV Guide for a portion of his comment but does not carry over the view of Rudnik (Nosenko), a Soviet defector himself, that Nosenko was bona fide. [My comment: What a surprise!] This view is contrary to that of the script writer, who does not deserve the reviewer's praise for his research. [LOL!] Whatever the writer may have read, or whomsoever he interviewed, the story is essentially that of "Steve Daley." [Tennent H. Bagley] "Daley's" participation is also suggested by the elimination of various errors which had appeared in Edward J. Epstein's and other commentaries on the case. [That’s a good thing!] Certainly, one can agree that the casting was excellent, although least so of the Nosenko role, Nosenko actually being a considerably more imposing personality than Rudnik's slight frame and somewhat tentative delivery could ever portray. Angleton (Sommer) is indeed well done but would have been better shown standing up to his hips in a trout stream, wearing his hat constantly, and gold-smithing; the major omission in characterization is that Angleton seldom maintained eye contact with people, and none of the clothing worn by Sommer would ever have appeared in Angleton's conservative closet. The portrait of the Chief of Security [Howard Osborn] overseeing construction of the Nosenko dungeon and later overseeing preparation of the study which exonerated him, was well done.

The depiction of Nosenko's dungeon and his treatment in it was not quite accurate: His exercise pen did not afford him a view of the surroundings, nor was he ever permitted a view of the night sky, which might have allowed him to estimate his location on the earth's surface, based on his [alleged] training at the Leningrad Naval Academy (where [ostensible] KGB victim Nick Shadrin was [allegedly] a contemporary and acquaintance). Of course, the whole truth does not leave "Daley" looking as noble as the film does, but why should we remain silent while Davis and Massey take a real case from our embattled heritage and embroider it? As a history of CIA's early treatment of Nosenko it is distorted, highly selective, misleadingly incomplete, and quite one-sided. It appears, in fact, to keep alive the fiction [Wrong] that Nosenko was dispatched to us by the KGB [He was — to Geneva in June 1962 by the Second Chief Directorate’s General Oleg Gribanov to discredit what recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling Angleton about possible penetrations of the CIA and the intelligence services of our NATO allies]. How much admiration and praise should serious former intelligence officers bestow on such a mélange of art and life?

The Nosenko-Counterintelligence anomaly is an episode of the counterintelligence era dominated by the outlandish theories and fanatic beliefs of Anatoliy Golitsyn. [LOL!] If there had been no Golitsyn defection in December 1961, the dark period in our Soviet operations which endured for almost five years, and its seemingly endless aftermath, would never have happened. We are all aware that most defectors are suspicious and jealous of -- and hostile towards -- other defectors, but Golitsyn's cunning carried this phenomenon a shrewd step further-by claiming that the defectors who came after him would be sent to attempt to contradict and muddle his information. [That’s exactly what Igor Kochnov did — when he contacted the FBI in 1965 and, without his or J. Edgar Hoover’s telling the CIA about said contact, proceeded to contact the CIA in 1966.] In one article and book after another, as in this film, Golitsyn's intelligence contribution is glorified in a manner which suggests that he provided the evaluation himself. The truth is quite different. Golitsyn certainly was not the best defector ever -- far from it. He did not identify "hundreds of agents," [Who said that he had???] nor did he spend five years planning his defection [How do you know?], meanwhile amassing a great fund of documents [information in his head, actually] to bring out with him. Actually, Golitsyn never compromised any important Soviet agent, unless one counts the NATO press attaché, who could not have been doing us major damage. [Wrong. He compromised plenty.] To be sure, we are not fully privy to his impact on the French services, but massive penetration of Western intelligence/security services generally were never borne out [Wrong], and his mind-boggling pipedreams that the Soviet ideological feuds with the Chinese, Yugoslavs, and Romanians were deception operations would have been ridiculed if Angleton had not mistakenly embraced it. [Never heard of Sun Tzu?] Golitsyn was certainly the only Soviet intelligence officer Angleton ever got to know well. Nevertheless, Angleton led "Daley" to the light (Golitsyn infallible, Nosenko phony), not exactly as in the film, but nearly so [Actually, Bagley convinced Angleton that Nosenko was fake about a week after Bagley and Kisevalter had finished interviewing Nosenko in Geneva and Angleton had suggested to him that he read the thick file he had on Golitsyn], and then Nosenko was doomed when he returned almost two years later as a [Rogue] defector. The security chief says in the film that maybe "Daley" and his boss had prejudged Nosenko's bona fides before they ever debriefed him, and what if he was really bona fide? That, of course, is exactly what happened, and he was. [My comment: No, he wasn’t. He was as phony as a three-dollar bill. Just read Bagley’s book, Spy Wars, and see for yourself.]

The reviewer asserts, on grounds not revealed, that Golitsyn's information conflicted with Nosenko's. Well, not that much [Oh, yes it did], and when it did, Nosenko usually gave more detail and was right. [LOL! Good one!] The case against Nosenko stated that the two KGB defectors' information overlapped on a dozen or so [a lot more than that] matters, but this was true only because Golitsyn had spent a brief period in the Second Chief Directorate, where Nosenko had [ostensibly] spent his whole KGB career [in a different part of the SCD than Golitsyn] in the highly compartmentalized KGB]. No wonder his information was better than Golitsyn's. [LOL!}

Even when Golitsyn was on target, as in the case of the Soviet agent in the Admiralty [John Vassall], he could not provide enough detail to pinpoint him [He enabled the Brits to narrow down the suspects to three], so MI-5 might easily have missed Vassall, by assuming that the information Golitsyn had seen in reports was really on the Houghton-Gee net which worked for, and, thanks to Goleniewski, was arrested with the Soviet illegal, Lonsdale/Molody, in January 1961. (See Chapman Pincher's Their Trade is Treachery.) This would have made sense, since Golitsyn had already been in Helsinki for well over a year, so his information had to be backdated at least that far. When Nosenko walked in six months after Golitsyn's defection, he was able to put MI-5 directly onto Vassall [Who was sure to be uncovered soon based on Golitsyn’s information, so he was the perfect person for the KGB to “burn” in the interest of building up Nosenko’s bona fides]. None of this is meant to impeach Golitsyn's bona fides, for considering that Golitsyn spent most of his KGB career in training [Not true! — he spent most of his time in a KGB think tank!], it is not surprising that he had meager information on specific agent operations. [LOL!]

One specious, but telling, argument made against Nosenko, taken up rather clumsily in the film, is the supposed attempt of Nosenko to mislead us about microphones in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Apparently, we are to believe from the movie that Nosenko said there were no microphones in the embassy. What Nosenko actually said was that there were none in the embassy annex which was completed in the early sixties. Both Goleniewski and Golitsyn had reported having read reports which were based on technical penetration of the embassy. The pertinent embassy offices (including that of a very angry, doubting political counsellor) [Who???] were stripped and examined without any mikes being found. Then came Nosenko and told us just where to look; the inspection was made and the mikes were discovered, all connected by wire leading to a main cable on the embassy roof. Immediately adjacent to the cable leading from the old Embassy building the sweep team discovered an identical cable; this cable was followed down into the new annex and the wires branching off from it were found to lead to more mikes concealed in the walls of the annex. Instead of being given credit for this discovery, Nosenko was accused of lying about the existence of microphones in the annex! [Well, he did lie!!!] The team working under ''Daley's'' dogmatic direction to prepare the case against Nosenko did not learn the moral implicit in this incident--that there is compartmentation in the KGB. [You’re arguing against yourself; see above.]

The Soviet handling of Oswald, which the film treats by evoking the emotions surrounding the Kennedy assassination, is no great mystery, and an incubus only because we created one out of it. In the first place, even if Nosenko had been assumed to be telling the truth about his involvement with Oswald's case (which he was) [How do you know?], why on earth would any experienced operations officer accept as valid Nosenko's genuine conviction [Huh?] that he knew just exactly what had happened to Oswald in the USSR? Just because Nosenko had seen a security file on Oswald, he need not have been knowledgeable of intelligence or operational exploitation of Oswald. If Oswald had been selected for indoctrination and training to return to the U.S. and kill the President, would the planning record, or even a hint of that delicate conspiracy, with its potential for launching World War III, be right there in the archives for all to read and marvel over? Certainly not. This is why our confusion over Nosenko's bona fides was not a disservice to the Warren Commission. Indeed, there is no objective reason to doubt that the Soviet handling of Oswald was just as described by Nosenko, for two equally persuasive reasons. As Nosenko said, Oswald was "loony," and that could suffice to cause the KGB to leave Oswald to his own devices, even to encourage him to go home, as was actually done the day before Oswald slashed his wrists. [Ironically, Nosenko later claimed that the politically powerful mother-in-law of Kochnov (see above) overrode Nosenko and permitted Oswald to stay in The Worker’s Paradise “and not be recruited by the KGB.” Hmm.]

If that had not been enough to discourage KGB involvement with Oswald, there was another overriding reason, related to the 1959 detente atmosphere, Khrushchev's U.S. visit, the U.S. exhibition in Moscow, etc. As soon as Oswald attempted suicide, his request for political asylum was taken over by Minister of Culture Yekaterina Furtseva [see above], who was closer to Khrushchev than any other Soviet politician of the times. For the KGB to have pursued Oswald in any manner after she took over the case would have been foolhardy, although perhaps possible in Beriya's or Andropov's days. Had the Soviets debriefed Oswald, it would not have been the KGB which had first claim but the military intelligence service, the GRU, because of his military service, radar knowledge and U-2 tidbits. Without its raising any doubts as to his veracity and motivation, for Nosenko to say that no one debriefed Oswald need not have been given the weight which it was by the anti-Nosenko team, as the GRU might well have put an expert in Oswald's path in Minsk, after his military service became known, to talk to Oswald about his Atsugi [U-2 base] Marine [radar operator] duty. Of course, if he had objected to such elicitation and Furtseva had learned of it, GRU Chief Serov probably would no longer have been around in November 1962 to be removed in disgrace after the Penkovsky arrest. The record of any such hypothetical GRU debriefing might have been in the Belorussian Republic KGB file which was hastily flown to Moscow in November 1963 (actually it was not in there) but would hardly have been duplicated in the national KGB file.

When Nosenko lied to "Daley," it should have been clear that he was an individual to whom lying was a normal component of official and personal life. Nosenko was the son of an old Bolshevik who had achieved cabinet rank and great honor, including having not one, but two, of the USSR's largest and most important naval (surface vessel) shipyards named after him, in Nosenko's birthplace. Nosenko had taken every advantage of this inherited prestige, with no thought or effort to achieve anything on his own. His dissolute youth was capped by his shooting himself in the foot at the Naval Academy to avoid further military service. Of course, "Daley" should have ploughed through the mendacious puffery recorded in the debriefing transcripts to home in on Nosenko's significant knowledgeability [Bagley points out in his book, Spy Wars, that Nosenko didn’t uncover anyone who wasn’t already suspected or who still had access to classified information], but it disturbed and blinded him so that he even concluded that Nosenko was not Nosenko [Nosenko muttered this to himself one day in 1964 or 1965 when he fell into a trance-like state under sharp questioning] and had never served as a KGB staff officer [How else to explain his lack of knowledge on such things as how to send a cable, how many of the American Embassy’s floors were dedicated to the CIA (3), and where the cafeteria was at KGB headquarters?]. When he was corrected on this point in no uncertain terms (as in the movie) by Angleton/Golitsyn, he should have reviewed all his other assumptions and conclusions and adopted an entirely new approach to understanding Nosenko's personality and to evaluating his bona fides, but he did not. All Nosenko's lies, as a gifted CIA psychologist, together with a psychiatrist, tried to tell "Daley" and his boss in the early days of the case, were intended by Nosenko to make himself appear more important, more decent, perhaps more like what his father would have wished him to be. He lied obviously and repeatedly about himself, but for his own psychological reasons, not at the behest of the KGB. [LOL! He lied, and lied badly because he was a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to support through the likes of Kulak, Kochnov, Orekhov and Yurchenko, because he was telling the CIA and the FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear — that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with former sharpshooting Marine U-2 radar operator during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.]

Any veteran debriefer knows that in practically every Soviet defector's behavior some element of this tactic is present (even in some of us). Just as Golitsyn employed the clever variant of exaggerating his knowledge by an order of magnitude [Not during his first two years in the West], Nosenko tried to inflate his personal prestige. According to naval officials quoted in Henry Hurt's book, even the brilliant and most valuable military· defector ever [if he was a true defector, that is], the incomparable Nikolay Artamonov (Shadrin), flunked his first polygraph, for reasons he took to his grave, but he manifested none of the paranoia which is second nature to KGB officers.

Of the several reviews of the Nosenko case since the one conducted under the security chief in 1966-67, [HSCA perjurer] John L. Hart's was conducted "in-house," in part to assure that all information available from any source would be included in the review. Otherwise, there would always be some who would assert that the Cl Staff or the Clandestine Service had withheld information from the Office of Security, or that there were points of view which had not been properly heard. Nor was anything wrong with an earlier study by [Angleton’s confidant, mentor, mole-hunting superior, and probable KGB mole] Bruce Solie, a first-rate analyst, practically devoid of emotional content in his approach, and greatly assisted by a CS officer of top quality with extensive Soviet counterintelligence and operational background. But Hart had the advantage of a calmer environment, and he had also reviewed several of our most important agent/defector cases in the wake of his psychology studies following retirement, so he brought exactly the right tools, but most notably a remarkable intellect, into this review. There was never any suggestion of intent to "get anyone" through this review, nor was any influence exerted on Hart to reach a particular conclusion. [Read Bagley’s 15 September 1978 170-page HSCA testimony in which he rips Hart the proverbial “new one.”]

The reviewer refers to the crippling of our relations with foreign services as a result of the Nosenko case. But once again, he blames Nosenko where Golitsyn is at fault. The two services which were victimized in CIA's Golitsyn era were the Norwegians and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In both cases we made accusations against individuals in those services which turned out to be false. [Maybe] The worst incident was created by Golitsyn's fanciful case (see 'Wilderness of Mirrors") against a Norwegian external service secretary. When Angleton went to tell the Norwegian internal service chief that the secretary of his main rival was a Soviet agent, he set in motion a tragic sequence of events which lasted 12 years, by which time the falsely accused secretary had been cleared, the real spy secretary arrested, and liaison relations damaged. Also damaged was the career of a good CIA officer who had been in contact with the accused Norwegian. The case was classic Golitsyn -- he would take a hint or clue which had stuck in his mind (admittedly an impressive one), add what he took to be relevant detail from Agency personnel and operational files, and construct a hypothesis, which he would then defend with vigor and passion. Whoever resisted his analysis and conclusions was himself in danger of being accused of being a Soviet agent.

In the Canadian case, Golitsyn's primary contribution was his theory of massive penetration of Western services. The accusation was made against the chief of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Counterespionage Branch. The officer was forced out of the service in disgrace in 1972 but was later cleared and received an apology and indemnity from the Canadian government. In 1974, the new CIA counterintelligence chief had the case reviewed and the accusation withdrawn as untenable.

As far as we know, the British "Fluency" committee formed in London after GoIitsyn's 1963 visit there never found any spies in the British services, but its members from both services were converts of the Golitsyn massive penetration doctrine, nevertheless. So was French intelligence, although the French had somewhat more success than the British in arresting spies after interviewing Golitsyn.

The reviewer's other brief reference to the corrosive effect of the Nosenko case relates to ruined CIA careers and paralyzed Soviet operations. The negative effect of the Golitsyn era on our Soviet operational management was in fact devastating -- the inevitable culmination of a long-standing belief that CIA could not have a bona fide Soviet operation. [True, if McCoy, Bruce Solie and Kisevalter, et al. were KGB moles — and it sure seems that they were.] Potential cases were turned down [Not according to Bagley], ongoing operations were judged to be deception operations (including Penkovsky) [Well, it is interesting that JFK had to abandon The Monroe Doctrine to “get” Khrushchev to agree to remove his nukes from Cuba], and defectors who gave information supporting Nosenko's bona fides (as they inevitably did) were judged to have been dispatched by the KGB. [I’m sobbing uncontrollably.]

The worst case in this category of deception and self-deception, however, had a far worse outcome even than Nosenko's, Nosenko at least still being alive. Prior to his arrest in South Africa in 1967, CIA was running an agent [and false defector] named Yuriy Loginov, a KGB illegal (Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, Edward Jay Epstein). Following his arrest, CIA certainly had the opportunity to speak up in his defense, but the perverse logic of the Golitsyn era would not allow that. [Question: Why did Loginov tell his CIA case officer in Africa of a radio message he had received from Moscow before it was transmitted?] By the time Nosenko was released from his dungeon (unbeknownst to "Daley" and his boss--contrary to the film version), this illegal had been arrested by the South Africans and exchanged through a West German mechanism for some harmless Western agents held in the East, and he disappeared. (Loginov: Spy in the Sun-The New KGB, Barbara Carl) Yet another case termed "dirty" for the purposes of the anti-Nosenko analysts was that of a KGB officer [Cherepanov] who handed over some [out-of-date] documents [that dealt almost exclusively with how great Soviet surveillance was in uncovering GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov in late 1959, but who had probably been betrayed in early 1957 by probable mole Bruce Solie and recently-fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith in D.C. movie houses] to us in Moscow in November 1963. After charge' Walter Stoessel returned them to the Soviets, on the advice of political counsellor Malcolm Toon, the KGB officer was hunted down and shot. [Maybe]

A CIA officer [Station Chief Paul Garbler] risked his career by snatching [Huh? He only photographed the bogus documents] the papers from the hands of the Embassy officer dispatched to return them to the Soviets but was finally overruled by Stoessel and Toon. By the time the 900-page [835-page] anti-Nosenko paper [file summary, actually, by Bagley] had been revised, those [Cherepanov?] papers had been reevaluated as genuine. [Why whom, Leonard V. McCoy? Kremlin-loyal Kulak at the FBI’s NYC field office?] They had weighed heavily against Nosenko [How so?], but nothing was subtracted from the case against him when they were found to be genuine (Wilderness of Mirrors, David Martin).

The reviewer's assertion that careers were ruined by the Nosenko case is quite another matter. The careers of the few who resisted various elements of the conspiracy theory were hurt, but the only career ruined by the Nosenko case was that of "Steve Daley" who was, after all, the protagonist of an approach subsequently reversed.

The reviewer's stated belief in his summary paragraph that the Agency has recovered from the deep wounds inflicted by the internal conflict of the Golitsyn era is definitely wishful thinking, probably intended to end his review on a positive note. Unfortunately, the opposite can be argued with more logic and evidence. The reviewer may believe that there was a battle royal going on within the Agency, or at least within the Clandestine Service, over Nosenko. Nothing of the sort happened. The compartmentation of the case was the reason most officers could not have objected to the analysis or handling, and the other reason was the atmosphere prevailing at the time, discouraging anyone who questioned even the most minuscule aspect of the case against Nosenko, even unwittingly. The group employed in conducting interviews of Nosenko, drafting the memoranda which constituted the case against him and evaluating related cases in a manner which would bolster the case against Nosenko, was forbidden to discuss it with people not on the team. Only one person [Who???] this chosen circle took issue with the case against Nosenko and the methodology being used to prepare it. When he expressed his dissent, he was immediately removed from the team, warned to hold his tongue, and transferred to other work. He soon left the Agency. He was the unsung hero of the case. Three other officers [Who???] who refused to reevaluate their cases to fit Golitsyn's conspiracy theories were also transferred. As it happens, in 1965 this writer had occasion to review the case [Because Chief of Soviet Russia Division’s Counterintelligence Bagley’s thick file summary of the Golitsyn case was given to McCoy by his buddy, probable mole Richard Kovich, after snooping around for it for a year] and initially expected to find persuasive evidence against Nosenko. But he spotted too many internal inconsistencies and inaccuracies and wrote a forty-page refutation of the key analytical points. His analysis was not allowed to go forward to higher Agency echelons. Bypassing his immediate superiors, he succeeded in getting the case reviewed, but not without cost to his career progress. He has also been taken to task in various ways by the media, beginning with Epstein's disoriented "Legend" [for which Bagley was a source], but no writer has had access to this other side of the Nosenko story -- only the anti-Nosenko plot adherents have been heard until now.

To this day, none of the officers (all now retired) who attempted to counter the acceptance of the Golitsyn thesis and the convoluted effort to make Nosenko the living incarnation of the theory have received Agency recognition for it. None of the officers involved in making the case against Nosenko ever suffered for it, except for the setback to "Daley." Indeed, many went on to better positions. The only officer who was to see himself professionally vindicated was the psychologist who had warned from the beginning that Nosenko's debriefing could not be taken at face value and who was later officially thanked for his help in resolving the most difficult of cases --that of Nosenko.

The substantive debriefing of Nosenko was cut off after one desultory session [Huh?], but this aspect of bona fides testing, the best test in any case, was of limited application to Nosenko, since his knowledgeability lay predominantly in counterintelligence. His counterintelligence debriefing was also broken off in favor of the hostile interrogation, with the result that five years later he still had information on which he had not been interrogated. [He was probably furnished new “intel” by McCoy or Solie]. This review has primarily dealt with the false premises in the Nosenko case. We should merely add that there are also counterarguments against the lesser charges made against Nosenko and touched on in the film.

That still leaves unmentioned the one incontrovertible argument for Nosenko's bona fides, a point never addressed in the case made against him, nor considered by any of the self-styled intelligence experts in the media. This point is explicit in the obvious answer to the question -- did Nosenko have the intellectual and emotional qualities in his personality which would make him a candidate of the KGB (much less the final choice) to be selected, trained and briefed to carry out the staggering missions of protecting a top-level penetration agent, covering the KGB assassination of the President, and serving as the rock on which a worldwide, long-term conspiracy was to rest which would bring the Free World to its knees without firing a shot? The first few hours of debriefing Nosenko provided all the evidence needed to dismiss any such thought. If Nosenko really had been given an all-purpose legend, it would have been a lot more coherent and consistent than debriefings indicated. [He was a poorly prepared rogue defector who traded his “knowledge” of Oswald’s defection and stay in the USSR for a ticket to the West]. Even the most incompetent KGB "active measures" officer would hardly have given the deception (dezinformatsiya) agent of the century a legend which any previous or subsequent KGB defector could have destroyed in five minutes of debriefing. And what was Nosenko's primary function in Geneva [in 1962 or 1964?]? To supervise the running of a Soviet deception agent [Who???] against us, who had already been so identified by one of our officers on the case. One had only to compare Nosenko's personality, background and information with those of his (our) agent to know that Nosenko could never qualify for such a role [You’re right, but for reasons that destroy your argument that Nosenko was a true defector].

The resolution [LOL!] of the Nosenko case in 1976, and the exoneration of all the Agency officers falsely accused by Golitsyn/ Angleton, exposed the poverty of the existing counterintelligence mystique. The final irony came when one of Angleton's senior analysts [Clare Edward Petty] used the same twisted methodology to make a case against Angleton himself. There is no questioning the patriotism and loyalty of James Angleton, his intelligence, and infinite variety, but his eloquent and insistent confusion of the possible and the probable in serious counterintelligence matters hurt our national counterintelligence program.

Congressman Hamilton was correct in saying (see review in Winter 1986/87 Newsletter) that CIA is the primary victim of this unfortunate TV film. But what of [false defector in place in Geneva in June 1962 and rogue physical defector to the U.S. two months after the JFK assassination] Yuri Nosenko, the helpless victim of his legal custodian, whose human rights were blatantly violated by CIA, and whose dignity, self-respect and honor are once again casually impugned by this film? [I think I’m gonna cry!!!] Ironically, his futile incarceration in a deep Virginia forest restored him to the fundamental nobility of his nature, but that is not the preferred cure for paranoid personalities in civilized countries. Of course he is outraged by this movie, and it is fitting that CIA called him in recently and ceremoniously bestowed a large check on him. (This might have been a good time to bring together the forgotten few who resisted the pressure to make Nosenko the fall guy of the Golitsyn era.) For the rest of us, any claim we may have left to having served in an honorable and dignified profession dictates that we accept the Agency's judgment in this case that Nosenko was always bona fide, and our colleagues made a terrible mistake. Thank you, Yuriy Nosenko, for ourselves, for our Agency, and for our country. [Vladimir Putin couldn’t agree more.]

. . . . . . .

Note: One can read Bagley’s 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, for free by googling “spy wars” and “archive” simultaneously.