FOIA release / Muckrock article - CIA abandoned logic to clear Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko

[Anthony Thorne]

From the Muckrock site, a long new article digging in to a 1968 report from CIA's Office of Security, following a FOIA request for FBI files on Yuri Nosenko.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2...nko-logic/


I'll be curious if John Newman makes anything of this. I gather he's been eyeing the topic somewhat in his latest books. The CIA report on Nosenko is here.

https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2016...58-000.PDF

[Peter Lemkin]

The Nosenko matter is a complicated and somewhat confusing one. I think, however, one can not get anywhere on an analysis of the subject without a good background in the story of Robert Case Nagell - an American CIA/MI person who at least thought he had been 'hired' and directed by the Soviets to follow LHO and 'neutralize' him to prevent an assassination of JFK if he could not deter him otherwise. At the same time Nagell was under the control of a high-ranking CIA case officer [Henry Hechsher]. Nagell got so confused as to what was up and who was who, he chose to be in prison and not a free man at the time of the assassination. Throw into the mix Angleton, a hard-drinking and paranoid man [who likely knew at least the outlines of the players and plot of the assassination]. Then there is the problem of separating what those who interrogated Nosenko knew and felt and what they LED others, even inside the agency, to think they knew and felt regarding him and the Soviets in general regarding the assassination. If the reporting (even internal reporting) of the CIA on Nosenko is true [and I do not think it was in any way], the Soviets had little to no interest in Oswald (the current public stand of the Soviet/Russian/Belorussian intelligence is also that they had little or no interest). In fact, we know that at least a six ft stack of KGB and GRU files on Oswald currently exists in Moscow and a copy in Minsk - of which only a few pages have the JFK researchers been able to see. It also defies logic that whatever Oswald was - and I'm sure the Soviets knew him for what he was, a CIA/MI false-defector and/or dangle - they would have had GREAT interest in him and kept him under constant surveillance in the Soviet Union and very likely outside, after, as well (enter Nagell's assignment for them). Given the ongoing and secret conversation between Khrushchev and Kennedy, PREVENTING JFK's assassination would have been the choice of Khrushchev and perhaps even the KGB - and they would have penetrated the plot enough to know that Castro/Cuba and they were to be blamed for something homegrown in the USA. It is a very tangled Gordian knot and one I have not seen any researcher do a very good job of trying to untangle - yet. If one is not familiar with Dick Russell's excellent book 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' [second ed.] on Nagell, I don't think one can even begin to work on Nosenko, IMHO. Publicly, Angleton changed his mind on Nosenko, but I think it is more complex than that, and what he knew and felt at all times about Nosenko were both suppressed [by himself and others], as well as clouded by his need to hide the real scenario and conspirators involved in the assassination. Nosenko was IMO originally send as a false-defector to the USA to present a (false) viewpoint of Soviet intelligence. Tortured and mistreated for years - even subjected apparently to mind-control techniques - he as then abandoned by the Soviets and had no one but the CIA to turn to for his safety and life. What he said at any point is IMO highly suspect - as is what the CIA has to say on him even in their own internal documents.

Yuri Nosenko

Yuri Nosenko was born in Mykolaiv, Russia (now Ukraine), on 30th October 1927. His father, Ivan Nosenko, served under Joseph Stalin for nearly 20 years as the Soviet minister of shipbuilding.
While he was at the Frunze Higher Naval School he had deliberately shot himself in the foot to avoid military service. Despite this poor start to his military career, his father managed to arrange for him to enter the KGB in 1953. "There, he soon developed a reputation as a womanizer and drinker, and wore out his welcome among his father's old cronies. It took his mother's plea to the wives of the Kremlin powers, in particular the wife of Aleksei N. Kosygin, to save his career." (1)
Nosenko became deputy chief of the Seventh Department of the KGB. His main responsibility was the recruitment of foreign spies. In 1961 Nosenko was a member of the Soviet delegation to disarmament talks in Geneva. While in the city he was robbed of $200 by a prostitute. In an attempt to repay the money he approached a US official he knew to sell secrets. Nosenko was put into contact with Tennant H. Bagley, a member of the CIA. He revealed that he served in the Far East and specialized in the recruitment of tourists in Tokyo and other cities. Nosenko also told Bagley about listening devices at the US embassy in Moscow, and confirmed the identities of British Admiralty clerk John Vassall, the Canadian ambassador John Watkins and the CIA agent Edward Ellis Smith, all compromised in KGB "honeytrap" stings". (2)

Yuri Nosenko & Anatoli Golitsin

Some of this information had been revealed by an earlier defector, Anatoli Golitsin. But Nosenko denied Golitsin's claim of another Soviet mole higher up in the Admiralty, and refused to defect on the grounds he would not leave his wife and children behind. Golitsyn had been interviewed by James Jesus Angleton. A fellow officer, Edward Perry, later recalled: "With the single exception of Golitsyn, Angleton was inclined to assume that any defector or operational asset in place was controlled by the KGB." Angleton and his staff began debriefing Golitsyn. He told Angleton: "Your CIA has been the subject of continuous penetration... A contact agent who served in Germany was the major recruiter. His code name was SASHA. He served in Berlin... He was responsible for many agents being taken by the KGB." (3) In these interviews Golitsyn argued that as the KGB would be so concerned about his defection, they would attempt to convince the CIA that the information he was giving them would be completely unreliable. He predicted that the KGB would send false defectors with information that contradicted what he was saying. The CIA were now uncertain whether to believe Golitsin or Nosenko.

Lee Harvey Oswald

In January 1964 Nosenko contacted the CIA and said he had changed his mind and was now willing to defect to the United States. He claimed that he had been recalled to Moscow to be interrogated. Nosenko feared that the KGB had discovered he was a double-agent and once back in the Soviet Union would be executed. He claimed that he had been put in charge of the KGB investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald. He denied the Oswald had any connection with KGB. After interviewing Oswald it was decided that he was not intelligent enough to work as a KGB agent. They were also concerned that he was "too mentally unstable" to be of any use to them. Nosenko added that the KGB had never questioned Oswald about information he had acquired while a member of the U.S. Marines. This surprised the CIA as Oswald had worked as a Aviation Electronics Operator at the Atsugi Air Base in Japan. (4)
J. Edgar Hoover welcomed the information from Nosenko: "Nosenko's assurances that Yekaterina Furtseva herself had stopped the KGB from recruiting Oswald gave Hoover the evidence he needed to clear the Soviets of complicity in the Kennedy murder - and, even more from Hoover's point of view, clear the FBI of gross negligence. Hoover took this raw, unverified, and untested intelligence and leaked it to members of the Warren Commission and to President Johnson." (5) Members of the Warren Commission were pleased to hear this information as it helped to confirm the idea that Oswald had acted alone and was not part of a Soviet conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.

CIA and Yuri Nosenko

Richard Helms, the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans, was not convinced that Yuri Nosenko was telling the truth: "Since Nosenko was in the agency's hands this became one of the most difficult issues to face that the agency had ever faced. Here a President of the United States had been murdered and a man had come from the Soviet Union, an acknowledged Soviet intelligence officer, and said his service had never been in touch with Oswald and knew nothing about him. This strained credulity at the time. It strains it to this day." (6)
Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men (1995), points out that James Jesus Angleton also did not believe Nosenko. "Angleton never got over suspecting that the Russians or Cubans plotted to kill Kennedy. He thought that the Russians or Cubans plotted to kill Kennedy. He thought the Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, who claimed that the Kremlin was innocent, was a KGB plant to throw the CIA off the trail. But most reputable students of the Kennedy assassination have concluded that Khrushchev and Castro did not kill Kennedy, if only because neither man wanted to start World War III." (7)
Anatoli Golitsin provided information that supported Angleton's view. He had worked in some of the same departments as Nosenko but had never met him. After being interviewed for several days Nosenko admitted that some aspects of his story were not true. For example, Nosenko had previously said he was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. Nosenko confessed that he had exaggerated his rank to make himself attractive to the CIA. However, initially he had provided KGB documents that said Nosenko was a lieutenant colonel. (8)
The story was further complicated by the fact that another Soviet KGB defector under FBI control (code name Fedora) corroborated Nosenko's story. Therefore, if Nosenko was lying, it meant that Fedora was also a disinformation agent sent to the United States to confuse the security agencies. Nosenko was given two lie detector tests by the CIA. Both suggested he was lying about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Imprisonment

The CIA now decided to put Nosenko under intense physical physical and psychological pressure. This involved him being kept in solitary confinement for 1,277 days. A light was left burning in his unheated cell for twenty-four hours a day and he was given nothing to read and his guards were ordered not to speak to him. However, Nosenko did not crack and insisted that Oswald was not a KGB agent. (9)
James Jesus Angleton believed that Anatoli Golitsin was a genuine double-agent but argued that Nosenko was part of a disinformation campaign. However, Richard Helms (CIA) and J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) believed Nosenko and considered Golitsin was a fake. In 1969 Nosenko was released and given a false identity. He became an adviser to the CIA and the FBI on a salary of more than $35,000 a year. He was also given a lump sum of $150,000 as payment for his ordeal. (10)
Yuri Nosenko died on 23rd August 2008.