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Chapter 11: AEFOXTROT George Kisevalter had greased the line. The address in Manhattan that he had given to Yuri Nosenko before they parted in Geneva in 1962 belonged to an agency asset. If anything came in to that address from abroad, signed by "Alex," it would mean that Nosenko was trying to recontact the CIA. But Kisevalter did not trust even the best communications arrangements. He tested the link from time to time. They might never again hear from Nosenko, but if he did send a cable, a postcard, or a letter to the Manhattan address, it had to work. "We had the line greased. I would send a cable to COS, Copenhagen. 'Send cable to following address in New York.' I sent periodic messages from Copenhagen, Geneva, and other places to keep the line activated. And to time it -- how soon would we know the message had arrived?" The timing was important, because the CIA was to meet Nosenko, in whatever city he was, under the movie marquee beginning with the highest letter of the alphabet three days after he sent the cable to the New York address. At Langley, there had been changes since Nosenko's first meeting with the CIA in June 1962. Howard Osborn, who had replaced Jack Maury as chief of the Soviet division, had in turn been succeeded in 1963 by David E. Murphy. In the fall of 1962, Pete Bagley had come back from Switzerland and joined the division as a counterintelligence officer. Having been shown the Golitsin file by Angleton, he was now persuaded that Nosenko was a plant, a dispatched agent of the KGB. Late in January 1964, Yuri Nosenko returned to Geneva with the Soviet disarmament delegation. "A cable came in to New York," Kisevalter said. "I found out within hours. I flew to Geneva and Bagley flew in separately." "Bagley met him [Nosenko] under the marquee of the movie theater in Geneva. [1] He gave Nosenko a note with the address of the safe house. We went to a different safe house from the one we used in 1962." And so the first of half a dozen meetings in the new safe house began. Nosenko did not know, of course, that one of the two CIA case officers he was meeting with -- Pete Bagley -- now believed him to be a Soviet plant. It was only two months after the Kennedy assassination. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, and the Warren Commission, which Johnson had appointed to investigate the murder of President Kennedy, was about to begin hearing the first of 552 witnesses. The tragedy in Dallas was on everyone's mind, but what Nosenko now told Kisevalter and Bagley staggered the two CIA men. He had, he assured them, personally handled Lee Harvey Oswald's case when the former Marine arrived in Moscow and asked to remain in the Soviet Union. "Oswald came up almost immediately," Kisevalter recalled. "We questioned Nosenko about every detail on Oswald." What Nosenko told the two CIA men was that the KGB had decided it had no interest in Oswald. And Nosenko added that he was the official who ordered that Oswald be told he would have to leave when his visa expired. When Oswald then attempted suicide, Nosenko continued, his decision to order Oswald to leave the Soviet Union was overruled by other officials outside the KGB who had decided it would be best, under the circumstances, to let Oswald stay. According to Kisevalter, when Nosenko was asked why the Soviets had reversed themselves, he replied: "Because he tried to commit suicide. There would only be adverse publicity if he tried it again." As Nosenko later explained it to a congressional committee, the Soviets concluded that if Oswald did succeed in killing himself, the reaction in the press would harm "the warming of Soviet-American relations." [2] After Kennedy was shot, Nosenko said, General Oleg Gribanov, Nosenko's boss as head of the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, had ordered Oswald's file rushed from Minsk by military plane. Nosenko said he had examined the KGB file on Oswald and found it to be a routine record of Oswald's stay in Minsk, with references to his wife, Marina. There was, Nosenko said, no indication at all that the KGB had ever approached Oswald for operational purposes. The two CIA officers in Geneva quickly relayed Nosenko's account to Langley headquarters. As might be imagined, the KGB man's statements caused great controversy within the CIA and later created a problem as well for the Warren Commission, which had to decide whether to give credence to his story. In the 1964 Geneva meetings, Nosenko also ranged over a wide variety of other subjects. The recent capture of Oleg Penkovsky also loomed large on the minds of his questioners. Nosenko provided the first account of how Penkovsky was caught. According to the KGB man, Penkovsky's downfall had begun almost by chance. George Kisevalter summarized Nosenko's story. "Penkovsky had one weakness that all Soviet intelligence officers have who work for the army," he said. "They do not appreciate the lengths to which the KGB can go. Internal surveillance is directed against the Russians. In Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], there is an excellent KGB school for surveillance. A Seventh Directorate School. Leningrad is a cosmopolitan city, with a variety of ethnic types. The candidates for the school are chosen from Leningrad or elsewhere, then assigned to Moscow. If they came from Moscow, there's a chance they would be spotted by friends or relatives, so they select them from Leningrad." In Moscow, Kisevalter explained, the KGB maintains "light surveillance" even on the wives of diplomats. One of the women being watched was Janet Ann Chisholm, the wife of the MI6 station chief. "One person trained in Leningrad and now in Moscow says, 'I think this woman reacts to a Russian.' 'Who's the Russian?' 'I don't know. He disappears.' So they assign a more experienced officer. They watch Janet Ann Chisholm. "From ballet school she walks to get the bus. She walks by a commission shop, where Soviets bring icons and other objects for sale. She browsed in the store and she'd see Penkovsky walk by. She would leave and would follow him to the end of the block where there was an arcade with shops, and steps going down. Out of sight, he could pass films without looking at her. It was an alternate to the park. "There were eleven meetings with Chisholm, all told, at the park or the arcade. The park was near the British residences. It was a very small, triangular park. Three streets led into it and he could come from any direction, and drop candy or cassettes into her shopping bag. "When the KGB spotted her, an artist is called in and the two KGB guys describe how the man was dressed. They dress a guy like Penkovsky. They tell him, 'You are to walk in front of the woman, but don't turn your head so she can see your features.' They inserted him in front of Ann and she turned to follow him. "Now the Sovs are sure that Chisholm is in contact with the as yet
unknown Soviet. They call out the brigades, little girls bouncing balls,
helicopters to read invisible X's on top of embassy cars, an army of
surveillance agents. They spot Penkovsky being followed by Ann and
locate who he is and where he lives. It's an apartment house on an
island in the middle of the Moscow River. "A friendly old gentleman happens to be next to him and says, 'I'm a doctor.' The doctor happens to have an ambulance around the corner which takes Penkovsky to the Kremlin Polyclinica inside the Kremlin. They pump his stomach while the KGB searches the apartment. They find nothing. This was September-October, after the last meeting with Penkovsky. The KGB searched carefully so as not to tip off Penkovsky they had been there. "The reason they didn't find anything is that Penkovsky had a desk drawer he had built with a trick way to open it. All of his spy paraphernalia was in the desk drawer." The KGB, according to Nosenko's account, now decided to place Penkovsky and the apartment under round-the-clock surveillance. "They checked on the people upstairs," Kisevalter continued. "A big steel trust executive. They got his boss to call him in and give him a trip to the Caucasus with his wife. For many years of service to the state, fulfilling the plan, et cetera. 'Who, me?' the guy says. But the steel executive is pleased. Then the boss says, 'I have a newly married nephew coming to Moscow. You know how it is to get permission for an apartment. Can I have the key while you're gone?' The executive was hardly in a position to say no. "The 'nephew' and his 'wife' move into the apartment. There are geraniums allover in window boxes. Penkovsky's wife, Vera, and Galina, the daughter, are visiting Varentsov. They are out at the marshal's dacha. Penkovsky is alone in his apartment. The KGB is watching with binoculars from their LP [listening post] across the river. They relay word to the 'nephew,' Penkovsky is doing something in his desk. On a signal from the LP, down comes a huge pot of geraniums on a cable. It has a hidden camera that is silent. The pictures are developed and they see on the film how to open the desk drawer. Again they poison him, go in, and this time they find the material in the desk, the one-time pad, the camera. It was Nosenko who told me this story." During most of the Nosenko debriefings in 1964, Kisevalter said, Serge
Karpovich, a CIA case officer, was present. "He was working for Bagley,
who wanted his own man along, and was concerned I would not go along
with him on Nosenko's bona fides, which Bagley did not believe." To bug
the sessions, Kisevalter said, "Karpovich was trying to use electric
wave pulsation recording. You use ordinary household current to bug a
room. It didn't work worth a damn. So we just brought in an ordinary
tape recorder." Ten months later, in the fall of 1964, Robert Lee Johnson confessed to the FBI that while an Army sergeant stationed in Berlin in 1953, he had contacted the KGB, which recruited him as a spy. Johnson in turn recruited his best friend, Sergeant James Allen Mintkenbaugh. Johnson was later assigned to the Armed Forces Courier Center at Orly Airport, a heavily guarded communications center for top-secret and other highly sensitive material. In the fall of 1962, he used the KGB X-ray device to read the combination of the vault. Seven times, he removed secret documents and drove to a rendezvous with KGB agents, who photographed the material so that Johnson could replace it in the vault before dawn. Nosenko, Kisevalter said, described a bizarre group of KGB technical experts who had developed and worked with the hazardous X-ray machine. "He told us about the KGB squad called 'the toothless ones,' so called because they had been exposed in their training to radiation by the very instrument used in Paris to read the combination of the lock. The X-ray machine had two parts which had to be put together. There were about fifteen in this high-tech group. They all had false teeth, metal teeth, I think. One of the toothless ones came to Paris to show Johnson how to use it." [3] In the Geneva safe house, Nosenko also talked about Aleksandr Cherepanov, the KGB man whose controversial packet of papers Paul Garbler had managed to copy, only three months earlier, before diplomats in the American embassy in Moscow had insisted on giving them back to the Soviets. The papers had contained reports of KGB surveillance of American diplomats. "When we asked him about the Cherepanov papers," Kisevalter recalled, "he said, 'These are my operations.'" The case officers pressed Nosenko. If Cherepanov was a legitimate KGB officer, what was his motive for turning over the papers to the couple from Indiana who brought them to the embassy? "Cherepanov resented being treated by the KGB as a stooge," Kisevalter said. "He and another officer signed off to destroy papers at the KGB. He managed to keep the material from going in the burn bag." Paul Garbler, if Nosenko's account was accurate, was correct in fearing that Stoessel and Toon, by returning the papers, had sealed Cherepanov's fate. Nosenko not only claimed that the operations described in the papers were his, he said he had participated in a nationwide manhunt to track down the errant KGB man. "Nosenko went north chasing Cherepanov," Kisevalter said. "But they caught him in the south. They nailed him on the Iranian border and executed him." During the clandestine meetings with the CIA officers, Nosenko provided the first hint that he was toying with the idea of defecting to the West. "We talked about his future," Kisevalter said. "He was expecting a letter from his wife. 'By mail?' I asked. 'No, from Guk. He's coming from Moscow.'" Yuri Ivanovich Guk was the KGB colleague whom Nosenko had talked about in 1962; it was Guk who Nosenko said had warned him to stop seeing the British secretary who worked for MI5 in Geneva. "Guk brings the letter," Kisevalter continued. "Nosenko comes early one day and reads it to me alone. He's upset. It was an intimate, sentimental letter with news of his family. He's saying, 'They may not send me out again. Maybe -- I should stay.' He said, 'Maybe I'll never see her again.'" To Kisevalter, Nosenko was struggling with his emotions and the pull of his family. Even so, the case officers were stunned, "stupefied," as Bagley put it, when on February 4, Nosenko dropped a bombshell. He said he had decided to defect, because he had received a cable recalling him to Moscow. He asked for the protection of the CIA. "He said, 'I've been ordered home,'" Kisevalter recalled. "Bagley ran for the cable room and told headquarters of the recall." Despite Bagley's conviction that Nosenko was a KGB plant, he urged that Langley agree to take him. Nosenko's information about Oswald was so potentially explosive it overrode the CIA officer's objections. Recalling Bagley's action, Kisevalter said, "He recommended we accept him in view of the Kennedy assassination, and what Nosenko had said about Oswald. Of course, the answer came back, grab him. If it comes out that we sent him home we're in trouble." Nosenko had said in 1962 he did not want to defect. He had changed his mind, he said now, because he feared the KGB suspected him, he might never be able to leave the Soviet Union again, and he wanted to build a new life. Much later, Nosenko admitted that his story of a recall cable was false; he said he had made it up to convince the CIA to accept him. "For reasons best known to the Soviet division," Kisevalter said, on instructions from headquarters "we spent days in Geneva on the organization chart of the KGB, including every individual he [Nosenko] could remember. Had we known he would defect, we would have got that information later." On February 4, Nosenko was given American identity documents and driven across the Swiss border to Germany in civilian clothes. After a week, he was flown from Frankfurt to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, arriving on February II. "He was kept in a safe house in northern Virginia," Kisevalter said. "A man-and-wife CIA team acted as cook and housekeeper and security." He was christened EFOXTROT. For Nosenko, his new life in the United States quickly turned into a nightmare that was to continue not for months, but for years. Angleton and Bagley viewed Nosenko's mission as twofold: to deflect from Golitsin's leads to moles inside the CIA, and to convey a message to the West that the KGB was innocent of involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald, and therefore had no link to the assassination of President Kennedy. On the face of it, Nosenko's assertion that the KGB had no interest in Oswald seemed to defy logic. As a former Marine, Oswald presumably had at least some information that the KGB might want to know. Moreover, Oswald had been stationed at Atsugi, Japan, a base for the U-2 aircraft. Since 1956, the CIA spy planes had been overflying the Soviet Union to collect intelligence data; and to the CIA it seemed improbable that the KGB would not want to debrief Oswald about the U-2. [4] Yet Nosenko held to his account; the KGB had not debriefed Oswald and
had not recruited Oswald. The reason Nosenko gave, in effect, was that
Oswald was too flaky for the KGB to want to deal with him. On March 3,
1964, a month after Nosenko defected, he was interviewed by the FBI. He
said he had made the decision to turn Nosenko had even more surprising news about Oswald for the FBI. From the
file, Nosenko said, he knew that Oswald had a gun in the Soviet Union
and "it was used to shoot rabbits. NOSENKO stated that Western newspaper
reports describe OSWALD as an expert shot; however OSWALD's file
contained statements from fellow hunters that OSW ALD was an extremely
poor shot and that it was necessary for persons who accompanied him on
hunts to provide him with game." [7] Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans, fell into that trap. When he testified to the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, Helms, by now a former CIA director, said that if Nosenko fed the CIA false information about Oswald's KGB contacts, "it was fair for us to surmise that there may have been an Oswald-KGB connection in November 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy." [8] But if Nosenko was indeed carrying a message, other, less chilling explanations were possible. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union, and had killed an American president. If he acted entirely on his own, it would not be hard to envision the Soviet leadership panicking after Dallas, and sending someone to reassure the United States that the Soviets had no connection to the assassination. But Helms was right about one thing-it was of "the utmost importance to this Government to determine the bona fides of Mr. Yuri Nosenko." [9] The questions over Nosenko's authenticity were to split the CIA down the middle, with Angleton, Bagley, and their adherents on one side of the chasm and most of the agency's officials on the other. While many members of Angleton's staff believed, with their boss, that Nosenko was "bad" or "dirty" -- the shorthand terms favored inside the CIA for false agents -- most officials of the Soviet division, and the agency's leaders, eventually concluded he was what he said he was, a genuine defector. The debate over Nosenko, however, has continued to this day, particularly among former CIA officers. But in the beginning, the doubters prevailed. There was, to start with, the matter of Nosenko's rank. According to Bagley, "He was a major in 1962 and a lieutenant colonel, he said, when he came out in 1964. Then he admitted he was a captain." But defectors before Nosenko had been known to inflate their rank and puff their importance in an effort to impress their new best friends. Intriguingly, however, the debate over Nosenko's rank tied in with the Cherepanov papers. Nosenko produced a KGB travel document that he said he had carried in 1963 when he participated in the man hunt for the traitorous Cherepanov, a document that showed his rank as lieutenant colonel. The CIA debriefers raised all sorts of questions about the document -- why did Nosenko still have it, why did it show a higher rank than captain, which he later admitted was his true rank? The CI Staff believed that the KGB had provided Nosenko with a phony document to support his claims of higher rank. "Why was he traveling to Geneva with an internal travel document, anyway?" asked Scotty Miler. "There was an explanation," a former high official of the CIA said. "He was a captain. Whenever they sent KGB officers out of Moscow they gave them the temporary rank of major or lieutenant colonel on the temporary ID card. Nosenko's expecting a promotion but he defects before it's finally signed. He thinks of himself as having been promoted." Nosenko's debriefers turned to the subject of "Sasha." Two years earlier, Anatoly Golitsin had warned of a mole in the CIA with that KGB cryptonym. Peter Karlow, the principal suspect, had been forced out of the CIA, but the gumshoes had been unable to prove that Karlow was Sasha, or even that there was a penetration of the agency. Did Nosenko know of a mole named Sasha? "We drew a blank from Nosenko on the name Sasha in '62," Bagley said. "In '64 he volunteered the name Sasha and said it was a U.S. Army officer in Germany. You'd think since it was only a year and a half before, he would have remembered that he didn't know about any Sasha." Bagley said that the Army officer's identity was established with the help of a later Soviet walk-in, whom U.S. intelligence code- named KITTY HAWK. Angleton's deputy, Scotty Miler, confirmed that "some of Nosenko's information was valuable." For example, Miler said, his leads also helped to narrow down the search for the Army officer. "Nosenko knew his Sasha had served in Berlin. He knew the time frame. The FBI located him. Sasha turned out to be an Army major. He was not prosecuted. He confessed and was used as a double. The bureau turned him." The Army officer, who needed money to pay for a German mistress, had been recruited by the KGB in Germany in 1959. He later returned to Washington and provided low-level intelligence to the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis. James E. Nolan, Jr., a former deputy assistant director of the FBI for
counterintelligence, believed the case had even more ramifications than
met the eye. By the time that KITTY HA WK, whom Nolan regarded as a KGB
plant, although others do not, had provided additional information that
led to the major, "he was no longer in the Army. He was given immunity
in exchange for his cooperation. Nosenko's Sasha was used briefly as a
double when the Soviets showed some new interest in him. We let it run
for a little while." The case of the Army major, while not very important in itself in the annals of the Cold War, illustrates the complexity of the world of counterintelligence. Golitsin warned of a Sasha in the CIA, Nosenko spoke of a Sasha in the military, who was identified with the help of a third Soviet KGB officer whose provenance remains unresolved to this day. Nosenko's debriefers questioned him as well, as they had in 1962, about Vladislav Kovshuk, the high-ranking KGB official who had visited Washington in 1957 under an alias. Golitsin had speculated that Kovshuk was so important that he must have come to the United States to meet a mole inside the American government, perhaps in the CIA. Nosenko repeated that Kovshuk had been dispatched to Washington to meet a KGB source code-named ANDREY. According to Bagley, Nosenko provided enough information to lead U.S. intelligence to a noncommissioned officer who had worked at the American embassy in Moscow, had since returned to the United States, and lived in the Washington area. By most accounts, ANDREY was a sergeant who had worked in the embassy motor pool." ANDREY knew nothing, and was not prosecuted," Bagley said. Kovshuk did meet with ANDREY near the end of the Russian's tour in Washington, Bagley added. "He made the contact, turned ANDREY over to the residentura, and then left. What was he doing the rest of the time? Nosenko did not know. 'He was hunting for him,' Nosenko said. We asked, , A chief of section hun ting for a source?' Nosenko said, 'It took all that time to find him.' But he was in the phone book in Washington, we pointed out. Nosenko had no answer." Bagley's comments on Kovshuk's mission capture the flavor of his view of Nosenko, and Angleton's, and of the interrogation that began in 1964. Virtually all of Nosenko's statements and explanations were met with a deep, pervasive suspicion. As a result, nothing Nosenko could say was accepted at face value. "Nosenko was a plant, is a plant, and always will be," Bagley said. [l0]
In this fixed view of Nosenko as a KGB plant, the leads the defector
provided were either yielding up spent assets, spies whose value was
long past, or were designed to deflect from the real mole or moles in
the CIA whom Golitsin was trying to uncover. "He was pointing away from the Golitsin leads to penetrations," Bagley said. "My test for defectors is, do they provide current access to previously unknown information? Nosenko didn't." But Nosenko seemed to have revealed a great number of cases. For example, what about his leads to Robert Lee Johnson, who cracked the safe containing NA TO secrets in Paris? "Robert Lee Johnson had lost his access and was a burned-out case," Bagley replied. On April 4, less than two months after the defector had arrived in the United States, the CIA began what its officials euphemistically referred to as the "hostile interrogation" of Yuri Nosenko. Although he had chosen to live in a free society, Nosenko was confined by the CIA for the next four years and eight months. For more than two years of this period, he was isolated in a concrete cell under brutal conditions. Later the conditions improved, but his movements were still restricted. Nosenko, to put it simply, had become a prisoner of the CIA, lost in an American gulag. Former CIA director Stansfield Turner has blamed Angleton for the decision to imprison Nosenko, a view bitterly disputed by Angleton loyalists. "Angleton ... decided that Nosenko was a double agent, and set out to force him to confess," Turner wrote. "... Angleton's counterintelligence team set out to break the man psychologically." [11] Responsibility for the decision to incarcerate Nosenko and place him under harsh interrogation was shared with Angleton by Helms; David E. Murphy, the head of the Soviet division; and Bagley, the division's counterintelligence officer. Murphy minced no words in telling Helms that Nosenko "must be broken" if the CIA was to learn the truth, although the agency's desire for more information, he admitted, "may conflict with the need to break Subject." [12] When questioned by a congressional committee about his own role, Helms
waffled. The decision, he said, "was jointly arrived at." He added: "I
don't know who exactly made the final decision. ... I was a party to the
decision. ... I don't want to duck anything. ... I was there. It would
not have been my final decision to make." [13] In testimony to the same
committee, Murphy was asked if he had "primary responsibility for what
happened to Nosenko." He replied: "I was responsible for the case." [14]
A former CIA officer who closely studied this period of the agency's history, however, had no doubt that " Angleton was the bottom line on incarcerating Nosenko. Absolutely. Murphy did it? Horseshit! Sure, Soviet division had responsibility for Nosenko, but it could not have happened unless Jim signed off on it, unless he agreed." The CIA officer then made a startling disclosure: "What Jim really wanted to do with Nosenko was send him back to the Soviet Union. Helms would have no part of it. And rightly so. Then the idea arose, let's start this harsh interrogation." One of the problems faced by later investigators was that it was almost impossible to find traces of Angleton's role in the affair. "I never saw a document he signed off on," the CIA man said, "but he didn't object. Jim's fingerprints were never on anything. He was the artist of all time. Nosenko was confined for three years. But in three years, Angleton never objected. There is no shred of evidence that Angleton ever complained to Helms." For almost a year and a half, beginning on April 4, 1964, Nosenko was confined under harsh conditions in an attic room of a safe house outside Washington. He had been told that day that he was being taken there for a physical and a polygraph test. He later described what happened. "After finishing the test an officer of CIA has come in the room and talked with a technician. [The CIA officer] started to shout that I was a phoney and immediately several guards entered in the room. The guards ordered me to stand by the wall, to undress and checked me. After that I was taken upstairs in an attic room. The room had a metal bed attached to the floor in the center of this room. Nobody told me anything, how long I would be there or what would happen to me." [16] Some days later, the interrogations began. Nosenko had no access to television, radio, or newspapers, his food was subsistence-level -- for many months it consisted mainly of weak tea, watery soup, and porridge -- and he was under constant observation. He was also denied cigarettes. "I was smoking from fourteen years old, never quitted. I was rejected to smoke. I didn't see books. I didn't read anything. I was sitting in four walls ... I was hungry ... I was thinking about food because all the time I want to eat. I was receiving very small amount, and very poor food." [17] Washington is brutally hot in the summer, and attic rooms unbearable. Nosenko told what it was like: "I was sitting in some kind of attic; it was hot, no air conditioning, cannot breathe; windows -- no windows, closed over. I was permitted to shave once a week, to take showers once a week. From me were taken toothpaste, toothbrush. The conditions were inhuman. ..." [18] As the days marched by, Helms had a problem: what, if anything, to tell the Warren Commission, which was pressing to complete its report. Helms met with former Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission chairman, and informed him that the CIA had been unable to establish Nosenko's bona fides and could not vouch for the truth of his story. The commission never questioned Nosenko, and its final report, issued on September 27, contained no reference to Nosenko. It is doubtful that Helms remembered to tell the former Chief Justice, whose Supreme Court promulgated strict standards to protect the rights of criminal suspects, that Nosenko was confined in an airless attic. But as bad as it was, Nosenko's quarters and the conditions under which he was held were luxurious compared to what awaited him. While the Russian was locked up in the attic, the CIA's Office of Security was constructing a special prison cell for him on the Farm. All CIA trainees go through courses at the Farm, a school for spies in Virginia near Colonial Williamsburg. The CIA base is under military cover as the " Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, Department of Defense, Camp Peary." Armed guards protect the installation, which stretches over ten thousand acres along the York River. The heavily wooded site is, of course, closed to outsiders and surrounded by a chain link fence. During World War II, it was a prisoner-of-war camp for captured German soldiers. Blindfolded and handcuffed, Nosenko was taken there in August of 1965 and placed in a twelve-by-twelve-foot windowless concrete cell in a house deep in the woods on the CIA base. Nosenko was watched day and night by a television camera. To occupy his mind, he secretly made a chess set from threads, but it was seen and confiscated by the guards. In an effort to keep track of time, he also fashioned a calendar out of lint from his clothing. He was desperate for something to read. He was given toothpaste, but it was taken away when he tried, under a blanket, to read the writing on the tube. Nosenko was held, interrogated, and polygraphed in this cell for more than two years. More than a year went by after Nosenko arrived at the Farm before he was allowed to get any fresh air and exercise. He was taken from his cell for thirty minutes a day to a fenced-in exercise pen, from where he could only see the sky. It was "deplorable," Helms later told congressional investigators, but the CIA was in a position where it risked criticism for holding Nosenko too long, but would have been "damned the other way" if it had not "dug his teeth out to find out what he knows about Oswald." The cell on the Farm, Helms tried to persuade the House committee, was therapeutic for Nosenko, almost a Virginia branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Mr. Nosenko, at the time he defected and before, was a very heavy drinker. One of the problems we had with him during his first period of time in the United States was he didn't want to do anything except drink and carouse. We had problems with him in an incident in Baltimore where he starting punching up a bar and so forth. One of the reasons to hold him in confinement was to get him away from the booze and settle him down and see if we could make some sense with him." [19] Nosenko was convinced he was given drugs, including "hallucination drugs," during his confinement. The CIA has denied this, claiming that Nosenko was given only necessary medications. [20] Helms testified that he turned down a request to administer "truth drugs, such as, I believe, sodium pentothal." Another CIA witness said the proposed truth serum was sodium amytal. [21] In his memoir, Stansfield Turner said Nosenko was given "one or more of four drugs on seventeen occasions." [22] Other psychological pressures were applied. For example, just before he was flown to the Farm, Nosenko was told by his CIA interrogators that he would be held for more than ten years. While confined, Nosenko was poly graphed three times. But the first two lie-detector tests were rigged, designed to break Nosenko and persuade him to confess that he was a dispatched agent of the KGB. The first time, the CIA man giving the lie-detector test was instructed to tell Nosenko he had flunked, regardless of the outcome. Nosenko was also told that the polygraph could read his brainwaves, which was not true. The results of a second polygraph-actually a series of polygraphs over ten days-suggested Nosenko was lying about Oswald, but the CIA later said the test was invalid. And small wonder; Nosenko was wired to the machine for seven hours for one test, and while his interrogators took their lunch breaks, he was left strapped to the chair so he could not move. One such "lunch break" lasted for four hours. The polygraph operator also harassed Nosenko, warning that there was no hope for him, and that he might well go crazy. Nosenko passed a third polygraph, which included two questions about Oswald, and the CIA considered this test to be the only one that was valid. Bagley personally handled the Nosenko interrogation by closed-circuit television that linked the special prison on the Farm to Langley headquarters. Three interrogators on the scene questioned Nosenko. Bagley contended that the CIA had not, at the outset, planned to incarcerate Nosenko for so long. "We expected it to be ten days, two weeks, to confront him with the holes in his story." Why, then, had it lasted more than four and a half years? "He dug himself deeper with new contradictions," Bagley said. "He clearly had not held the jobs he claimed. And he said he had participated in operations against the U.S. embassy that he didn't take part in. His statements were designed to hide something." Guided by Bagley, the interrogators pounced on any conflicts in Nosenko's story. For example, Nosenko had claimed that in Geneva in 1962, he personally participated in the operation against Edward Ellis Smith, in which the CIA 's first officer in Moscow had been sexually compromised by his KGB maid. Smith's entanglement with the KGB swallow was discovered in 1956. [23] Nosenko said he had been transferred to the Seventh Department, handling tourists, in 1955. "During the hostile interrogation of Nosenko," Bagley said, "he was confronted with the fact that he said he handled Smith, but how could he have handled Smith if he was already transferred to the tourist department? 'Who's Smith?' Nosenko asked. Upon which we played back the tapes of the '62 meeting in Geneva in which he talked about Smith. The tapes were loud and clear. He listened to them, and he said" -- here Bagley grimaced, imitating Nosenko -- "'Mr. Bagley got me drunk.'" It was, of course, entirely possible that Nosenko was puffing when he claimed to have entrapped Smith, but he surely would have known of the operation. The successful ensnarement, in bed, of the CIA's first man in Moscow would undoubtedly be the subject of considerable corridor gossip, and much snickering, inside the Second Chief Directorate. And it was also possible that the maid had been planted on Smith as early as 1955, before Nosenko transferred to the tourist branch. As with so much in the world of counterintelligence, almost every event can have an explanation that is either sinister or innocent, depending on one's viewpoint. James Angleton, for example, made much of the fact that the premier FBI source in New York City, a KGB officer code-named FEDORA by the bureau, had vouched for Nosenko's bona fides. This, Angleton believed, proved that FEDORA himself was a plant, since the FBI source had assured the FBI that Nosenko was a real KGB defector. It was a line of reasoning for which an undergraduate in a beginning college course in logic would be flunked. In the first place, Nosenko might be a real defector; the comments of the FBI's Soviet asset in New York would then be accurate. But even if Nosenko was assumed to be a plant, as of course Angleton believed, there were several alternative explanations for FEDORA 's statements, including the obvious possibility that the Soviet source in New York had not been told by the KGB that Nosenko had been sent. Or if Nosenko was real and FEDORA a plant, FEDORA might still support Nosenko to shore up his own credibility. The permutations and combinations were, in fact, endless. FEDORA'S comments about Nosenko really proved nothing about either man. A former high-ranking FBI official disputed Angleton's conclusion that FEDORA had vouched for Nosenko in the first place. "FEDORA was simply reporting overhearing a conversation about Nosenko in which two Soviets at the UN mission, probably both KGB, were saying, 'Oh, it's terrible about Nosenko.'" He pointed out that the New York Times, on February II, had carried a front-page article from Geneva reporting Nosenko's defection. It would have been read, of course, by Soviet diplomats in New York. "FEDORA wasn't confirming Nosenko's bona fides at all. He was reporting a conversation, and he had no knowledge of whether what he overheard was true. But to the Scotty Milers and other people in Angleton's shop, the information from FEDORA was just what they were looking for." Angleton had one reason to doubt FEDORA that was more persuasive. "FEDORA said a cable had been received from Moscow about Nosenko's defection," a former CIA counterintelligence officer said. "We ran all sorts of NSA tests and couldn't find any evidence such a cable existed." The National Security Agency, the nation's code-breaking arm, might not be able to read the Soviet code, but from information provided by FEDORA, it could perform traffic analysis that might indicate whether a cable was sent on the date, and at the time, that he said it was. NSA was not infallible, however, and it could not always pinpoint a particular message. FEDORA, code-named SCOTCH by the CIA, was Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, a KGB officer under cover at the United Nations, first as an employee of the secretariat and then as a scientific attache in the Soviet mission to the UN. He began feeding information to the FBI early in 1962, only a few months after he arrived in the United States to begin work on November 29, 1961, as a consultant to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Kulak, then thirty-nine, married and accompanied by his wife in New York, was a short, stocky man whose name, of course, meant "wealthy farmer" n Russian. "We called him Fatso," said an FBI man who worked the case. [24] Kulak was no run-of-the-mill KGB man. He was a spy who specialized in collecting scientific and technical secrets. He had a doctorate in chemistry and had worked as a radiological chemist in a Moscow laboratory. [25] As winter turned to spring in 1962, Kulak had walked into the FBI office on Manhattan's East Side one day and offered his services. He said he was disgruntled about lack of progress in his KGB career. The Soviet system, he said, had not recognized his abilities. But either Kulak or the FBI building might have been watched by the Soviets. Eugene C. Peterson, who served fifteen years in FBI counterintelligence, and became chief of the Soviet section, agreed that if FEDORA was genuine, he was taking a chance in the way he made the initial contact. "It was risky," he said. "It raised questions." Peterson, a tall, husky, balding man with clear blue eyes and a skeptical, streetwise face, added: "FEDORA provided a paucity of CI information. He did not identify any penetrations." Mostly, he said, FEDORA identified who was who in the KGB residentura in New York. J. Edgar Hoover had total faith in FEDORA, but it was always possible that the doubts at the working level never got up the line to Hoover. And the doubts did exist. "There were questions, right from the start," Peterson said. "And certainly for the last four to six years." On the other hand, a former high-ranking CIA official insisted that FEDORA had provided the United States with valuable information. He was convinced that the KGB man was a valid source, for several reasons. "There were a whole series of things," he said. "His attention to details about surveillance and countersurveillance. You surveil the individual and when he comes to the meeting you see if he is taking precautions, whether he is worried about being followed. FEDORA was worried about surveillance. If he walks out of his office and goes straight to the safe house, you know something is wrong. Then, there was his willingness to disclose information about KGB officers. Which he did. They don't like to give away identities of officers." Above all, the CIA man said, FEDORA had revealed to the United States what the KGB had tasked him to collect in the area of science and technology. "He gave us their S&T requirements. A KGB wish list. Identifying factories where military equipment was being manufactured. Everything he wanted was military. Tanks, missiles, everything. He was a very useful source, given the paucity of our access in those days." To make Kulak look valuable to the KGB, the FBI provided him with "feed material," genuine U.S. secrets cleared by the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and passed to FEDORA for transmittal to Moscow. "It was low-grade stuff," the CIA man said, "but not phony." The periodic clandestine meetings between Kulak and the FBI were videotaped. "I saw videos of FEDORA being debriefed," the CIA official related. "Chunky guy, typical Russian. These were New York FBI agents debriefing him, in English. With a big bottle of Scotch from which all were drinking." In February 1963, Kulak left the UN secretariat and switched over to the Soviet mission to the United Nations. In 1967, Kulak told the FBI he had been recalled to Moscow on normal rotation. When he returned in 1971, again as a scientific attache, he resumed his relationship with the bureau. But FEDORA 's position, if he was a true agent-in-place, became more and more tenuous. News accounts, including one by Seymour M. Hersh in the New York Times, suggested that the FBI had penetrated a Soviet diplomatic mission in the United States. Hersh reported that one of the reasons that President Richard Nixon had established the secret White House plumbers unit was ostensible concern that "a highly placed Soviet agent of the KGB ... operating as an American counterspy would be compromised" by the Watergate inquiries. [26] In 1971, during the furor over the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, Kulak reported that a set of the papers had been delivered to the Soviet embassy. The CIA scoffed at the report. In a meeting with David R. Young, one of the chiefs of the White House plumbers, CIA director Richard Helms said he discounted the report because "we know the fellow who has been giving us these reports and we have our doubts about them." [27] In all, Kulak/FEDORA served two years in New York with the UN secretariat, beginning in 1961, and then two tours with the Soviet mission between 1964 and 1977, with a four-year break in between when he was called back to Moscow . [28] Despite the doubts about Aleksei Kulak, KGB walk-ins are hard to come by; over this sixteen-year period, the FBI paid him approximately $100,000. "In 1977 when FEDORA was getting ready to go back for the last time," Peterson said, "we pointed out the articles that had been published. We told him, 'Your life is in jeopardy. ''Oh, I can handle that,' he said. My own view is that if he wasn't a plant, he would have been executed." After passing information to the FBI for more than a dozen years, Kulak/FEDORA returned to Moscow for the last time in 1977 and was subsequently seen there by the CIA, alive and well. That, of course, did not prove he was genuine. It either meant that Kulak was a true spy for the United States who had escaped detection, or a double agent for the KGB all along. "He would have been under surveillance in Moscow," Peterson said, "and when he met with the CIA, they would have moved in and rolled him up." In 1978, the writer Edward Jay Epstein revealed the code name Soviet diplomats had been assigned in this country for that long. Told that the FBI FEDORA, describing him as a KGB officer at the UN collecting data on "science and technology." [29] U.S. intelligence officials were shaken by the disclosure, because the description of the Soviet asset was so specific that they assumed he was a dead man. "We estimated that after the Epstein book, he [FEDORA] was through," a former senior CIA official said. "There is no way he could have survived." [30] But, oddly, nothing happened to FEDORA, as far as the CIA could learn. Boris A. Solomatin, who served as the KGB's New York resident from 1971 to 1975, during Kulak's second tour in Manhattan, offered one possible explanation. In an interview with the author in Moscow in September of 1991, Solomatin, although declining to refer to FEDORA by his true name, said: "There were circumstances that deflected suspicion. He was a Hero of the Soviet Union during the war, and it diverted suspicion." The debate over FEDORA'S bona fides has never subsided. The CIA accepted
him as genuine in 1975 (after Angleton's departure). [31] The FBI has
had more difficulty making up its mind, and has flip-flopped back and
forth on the question. In 1967, the FBI seemed to accept FEDORA as bona
fide. [32] At the same time that FEDORA was active, the FBI and later the CIA were receiving information from another Soviet source in New York City, Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, an officer of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. He was code-named TOPHAT by the bureau and BOURBON by the CIA, which preferred liquor over headgear. In intelligence circles, the names FEDORA and TOPHAT became inextricably intertwined, like ham and eggs. In 1966, Polyakov was sent to Burma, and in the early 1970s he was posted to India, where Paul L. Dillon served as his CIA case officer. Back in Moscow after that, he Continued to send information to the CIA, using a burst transmitter provided by the agency. The Soviets announced in 1990 that TOPHAT had been caught. They later said he had been executed on March l5, 1988. [33] But FEDORA and TOPHAT were sideshows. At Langley, it had become increasingly clear that the Nosenko interrogation was a disaster. Moreover, it was one that carried a potential for scandal if the public should learn that the CIA had imprisoned a defector. Whether Angleton and other CIA officials even stopped to consider the catastrophic effect on other potential defectors should the Soviets find out about Nosenko's ordeal is not known. But something had to be done. In 1967, Helms, by now the director of the CIA, ordered Bruce Solie, of the Office of Security, to review the question of Nosenko's bona fides. On October 28, Nosenko was finally taken from his cell and shifted to the first of three safe houses in the Washington area. Conditions improved considerably, but his movements were still restricted, and he was not a free man. [34] Not until March 1969 did the CIA finally allow Nosenko a two-week vacation in Florida. In a memo to Helms, Howard J. Osborn, the director of the Office of Security, wrote: "Nosenko is becoming increasingly restive and desirous of obtaining freedom on his own. After nearly five years of varying degrees of confinement, this desire, including that for feminine companionship, is understandable." [35] Bagley clearly saw the potential for scandal. He sent a letter to Angleton warning of the "devastating consequences" if Nosenko was set free. Taking pencil to paper, he wrote down a list of possible "actions" to handle the Nosenko problem. Option number 5 was "Liquidate the man," number 6 was "Render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug etc.). Possible aim, commitment to loony bin," and number 7 was "Commitment to loony bin without making him nuts." [36] But Bagley, who had risen to deputy chief of the Soviet division by 1966, never sent his list of chilling options to anyone, and it was obviously not meant to see the light of day. It became public only because in 1976, Angleton's successor as CI chief, George T. Kalaris -- with the approval of then CIA director George Bush -- named John L. Hart, a former station chief, to conduct another review of the Nosenko case. Hart discovered Bagley's penciled list in the files and told Congress about it. Bagley, ambushed by Hart, was furious. The options on his list, he said, were "never proposed, it was a thought process: here we sit with this guy and what do about it? These were handwritten notes in pencil, never shown to anyone else, never intended for anyone else." Had he really contemplated murdering Nosenko? "Of course not," Bagley replied. "I wouldn't permit it and it was not agency policy. There wouldn't be any thought of it. I might add it's my own policy as well. I don't go around killing people. And Hart knew it." But the thought had occurred; "liquidate the man" was one of the ghastly options on Bagley's list. In October 1968, Bruce Solie submitted his report to Helms, clearing Nosenko. [37] On the basis of the report, the KGB man was rehabilitated, hired as a consultant by the CIA, and given $137,052 in lost pay and resettlement expenses. [38] Helms did not have an easy time of it when he tried to explain the Nosenko affair to Congress. Representative Harold S. Sawyer, a Michigan Republican, asked the former CIA director whether he knew that what had been done to Nosenko, holding him without trial, subjecting him to "physical and mental torture," broke the law. Helms wasn't sure; he thought Nosenko's legal status fell into a "gray area." The congressman did not buy it:
Helms did not reply. As for Yuri Nosenko, he summed up his experience succinctly. "I passed
through hell," he said. "I was true defector." Notes: 1. Bagley was not sure of the movie theater marquee he stood under in Geneva that night, but "I think it was ABC. There was such a theater in Geneva at the time." 2. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 490. 3. According to Kisevalter, Nosenko's leads enabled the FBI to identify Johnson, but not to arrest him, since the bureau Jacked proof of his espionage. Back in the United States, and employed at the Pentagon, Johnson went A WOL in J 964 after his wife threatened to expose him as a Soviet spy. When FBI agents called on her to investigate his disappearance, she told them the truth, and implicated Mintkenbaugh. Johnson surrendered in Reno, Nevada, late in November and confessed. He and Mintkenbaugh pleaded guilty in J965 and were each sentenced to twenty-five years in federal prison. Johnson died in prison in May 1972 after being stabbed by his son, Robert, who was visiting him at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. 4. In 1978, when Nosenko testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he said the KGB was unaware of any knowledge Oswald might have had about the U-2 because it had not questioned him. Asked why Oswald, a radar operator at Atsugi, had not been interrogated about the U-2, Nosenko replied that the KGB "didn't know that he had any connection with U-2 flights." Testifying to the same committee, former CIA director Richard Helms said he found Nosenko's testimony on this point "quite incredible" and added that he had been unable "to swallow" it. On May 1, 1960, six months after Oswald arrived in the USSR, the Soviets
shot down the CIA U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Much of the plane
remained intact. From that date on, the Soviets had Jess need to
question anyone about the U-2; they had one. Investigation of the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee
on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol.
XII, p. 479, and September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 179. 5. FBI report of March 5, 1964, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 509. 6. Ibid., p. 512 7. Ibid., p. 513. 8. Ibid, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 21. 9. Ibid 10. Bagley stated this with utter conviction, and an almost religious faith, during an interview with the author early in 1990, twenty-six years after Nosenko's defection. "Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 44. 12. Memorandum, Murphy to Helms, February 17, 1964, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 87. 13. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 103. 14. Ibid., March 1979, Vol. XII, p. 531. I5. For the most detailed examination of Angleton's role, see Samuel Halpern and Hayden Peake, "Did Angleton Jail Nosenko?" in International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 3, No.4 (Winter 1989). The article, although an apologia for Angleton, does demonstrate that other CIA officials were involved. However, the study also quotes Bagley, in a footnote, as saying that the decision was "taken jointly" by the CIA officials involved, "including Angleton" (italics added). 16. Affidavit of Yuri Nosenko, August 7, 1978, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, pp. 106-8. 17. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Se1ect Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, March 1979, Vol. XII, pp. 524-25. 18. Ibid., p. 525. 19. Ibid., September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 31. 20. According to CIA records, however, Nosenko was given Thorazine, a powerful drug used to control psychotic disorders and manic depression. Other drugs administered were Zactrin, also known as Zactirin, a mild tranquilizer and aspirin combination no longer produced; Donnatal, an antispasmodic drug for indigestion; tetracycline, a common antibiotic; and antihistamines and cough syrup. Nosenko told a congressional committee in 1978 that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug, and speculated more recently that it was LSD. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September J978, Vol. XII, pp. 521,525, and 543; and Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 188. 21 Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 116, and September 1978, Vol. II, p. 532. 22. Turner, Secrecy and Democracy, p. 45. When questioned by the author, Turner said he did not recall the source of this information in his memoir. However, since Turner did not identify the drugs in his book, his assertion that Nosenko was given drugs seventeen times is not necessarily in conflict with the CIA's official position that Nosenko was given only normal prescription drugs, no truth serums. 23. The KGB prefers to call an agent used as a seductress a "sparrow." The CIA uses the term "swallow." The reasons for these ornithological differences are not clear. 24. FEDORA was later erroneously identified in some published reports as Victor M. Lessiovski, a KGB officer who held a high rank in the UN. Lessiovski was rumored to be the KGB resident in New York City. FEDORA told the FBI that Lessiovski was indeed a top KGB agent, an important man, but not the resident. A short, plump man who wa1ked his wife's pet poodle every night near their home in Manhattan, Lessiovski served as personal assistant to UN Secretary-General U Thant of Burma for eight years. The KGB man moved in the highest social circles in Manhattan. He was so well connected, in fact, that when Pope Paul VI visited New York in 1965, it was Lessiovski who arranged for Jacqueline Kennedy to meet the pontiff. The former First Lady was amused that she had been introduced to the Pope by the KGB. Lessiovski left New York in 1971 and returned to the Soviet Union. 25. Although a consultant, Kulak was an employee of the UN secretariat for two years, attached to the Office of the Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs. He held the highest professional rank at the UN below that of a director. 26. Seymour M. Hersh, "The President and the Plumbers A Look at 2 Security Questions," New York Times, December 9, 1973, p. J. To test whether FEDORA was in jeopardy as a result of the published reports, a former FBI counterintelligence agent said, the CIA gave one of the news stories to a low-level analyst. Within a few hours, he claimed, the analyst had pinpointed Kulak as the likely FB1 source. But Hersh's story did not indicate whether the KGB man was based in New York or Washington. It did say that the source had been a double agent "for nearly ten years," but other had been concerned that his story might unmask FEDORA, Hersh laughed. "The source came from high up in the FBI," he said. 27. David Young, "Memorandum of Conversation, July 21, 1971," in Statement of Information Submitted on Behalf of President Nixon, Hearings, House Committee on the Judiciary, May-June 1974, Book IV, p. 107. 28. Oddly, Kulak's name varied slightly on each tour. In Permanent Missions to the United Nations, the official diplomatic list of the UN, the name "Alexei Sidorovich Kulak" appears for the first time in January 1964, with the title "First Secretary" of the Soviet UN mission. From January 1968 through May 1971, he drops off the list. He reappears in September 1971, this time as "Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak," with the new title "Counsellor." He drops off the list for the last time in February 1977. 29. Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: Reader's Digest Press/McGraw-Hill, 1978), p. 20. 30. The counterspies were almost equally appalled by the apparent origin of the disclosure. It was well known in intelligence circles that Epstein's major source had been James Angleton. The former CIA counterintelligence chief, officials concluded, had deliberately blown FEDORA, whom Angleton considered a plant. 31. The CIA decision was based on a study by Benjamin Franklin Pepper, an officer in the Soviet division, who concluded that FEDORA was authentic. 32. Under the cryptonym VUPOINT, an FB1 study that year of FEDORA and other Soviet assets suggested that Kulak was a legitimate source. 33. In his book Spycatcher, published in 1987, former M15 official Peter Wright wrote that TOPHAT had provided information that Jed to the arrest in 1965 of Frank C. Bossard, a forty-nine-year-old employee of the British Aviation Ministry who was photographing documents about American missile guidance systems on his lunch hour. Bossard was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison. In fact, the FBI intelligence division had misled MI5, wrongly attributing these leads to TOPHAT in order to protect another GRU source in New York, code-named NICKNACK. 34. In all, from April 4, 1964, to August 13, 1965, Nosenko was confined to a safe house near Washington. From August 14, 1965, to October 27, 1967, he was imprisoned in the cell at the Farm. From October 28, 1967, to December 1968 he was held at three safe houses in the Washington area. 35. Memorandum, Osborn to Helms, March 24, 1969, in Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vol. IV, p. 41. 36. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U .S. House of Representatives, September 1978, Vo1. II, pp. 519, 525, 536. Some of the words in Bagley's jottings were abbreviated but are spelled out here for clarity. 37. A 900-page summary of the agency's file on Nosenko, prepared by Bagley, later cut by him to 447 pages, and submitted in February 1968, reached an opposite conclusion. It argued that Nosenko had lied on every major point about his KGB background. A decade later, the House Assassinations Committee also concluded that "Nosenko lied about Oswald." But the committee noted that the defector's imprisonment "virtually ruined him as a valid source of information on the assassination." The Final Assassinations Report: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 114. All other CIA studies supported Nosenko's bona fides. In addition to the Solie report, there were two 1ater internal reviews of the Nosenko case, one by John Hart in J976, while George Bush headed the CIA, and one in the spring of 198J, by Jack J. Fie1dhouse, a CIA officer, undertaken at the request of CIA director William J. Casey. Both reports, as well as Solie's study, concluded that Nosenko was what he said he was -- a KGB officer who changed sides and defected to the CIA. 38. Other Soviet intelligence officers who came over to the West in the years since Nosenko's arrival have said he was, as far as they knew, a bona fide defector. For example, Victor Gundarev, a KGB colonel who defected in Athens in 1986, told me in July 1989. "Nosenko was real. I was a student at the KGB Higher School in 1964. They talked about him as a traitor. Of course it could be a cover story, I don't know." It is true that other defectors might not have va1id or detailed knowledge about Nosenko. On the other hand, according to former senior CIA officials, no defector subsequent to Nosenko has provided information that casts doubt on his bona fides.
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