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MOLEHUNT |
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Chapter 6: Contact Early in June of 1962, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a thirty-five year-old KGB officer serving on the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva, approached an American diplomat and asked for a private talk. The diplomat notified the CIA station in Bern, the Swiss capital, and Pete Bagley, an officer specializing in Soviet operations, immediately left by train for Geneva. There, Bagley and Nosenko met at a CIA safe house. Nosenko, apparently very nervous, drank during the interview. He told Bagley he had been drinking before the meeting as well. [1] The encounter proceeded with some difficulty; Bagley spoke little Russian, and Nosenko's English was limited. A Russian-speaking CIA man was clearly needed on the scene. Headquarters was alerted. As soon as the cable from Switzerland arrived in Langley, George Kisevalter was told to fly to Geneva. Not only was Kisevalter fluent in Russian, he had handled the agency's two most important Soviet cases, first Pyotr Popov, then Penkovsky. He was the logical choice to meet Nosenko. It was a time of intense activity inside the CIA. Six months earlier, Anatoly Golitsin had defected in Helsinki, and his warnings about "Sasha," a penetration of the CIA whose name began with the letter K, had launched the secret mole hunt in Angleton's counterintelligence staff. Wiretaps were in place on Peter Karlow, who remained unaware that he was the principal suspect. In Moscow, Paul Garbler continued to monitor contacts with Penkovsky, who was still transmitting Soviet military secrets to the West, although he was increasingly nervous that the KGB might have discovered his espionage activities. Now, Yuri Nosenko had offered his services. He was, in time, to become the most controversial defector in the history of the CIA. "Bagley met the plane and took me to the safe house," Kisevalter said. "Nosenko would be coming over." But first, certain preparations had to be made. "We bugged the place," Kisevalter said. "I put in hidden microphones hooked up to a tape recorder." That done, Kisevalter and Bagley settled down to wait. It is doubtful that the CIA, had it tried, could have found two more disparate officers to assign to the same case. In style, personality, background, and appearance, the two men were a study in contrast. George Kisevalter was a big, shaggy sheepdog of a man, irreverent of authority, street-smart, a field operator at heart, and, deep down, resentful of the clubbish atmosphere of an agency that would, he felt, deny him top rank because he would always be an outsider, a foreigner at birth, born in czarist Russia. Kisevalter, the older of the two officers, was born in St. Petersburg in 1910. His father, the Czar's munitions expert, had been sent to Vienna in 1904 to oversee production of shells for the war with Japan. There he met a French woman from Dijon, a schoolteacher who returned to Russia and married him. When World War I broke out, the senior Kisevalter was sent to the United States to oversee a munitions plant near Chester, Pennsylvania, that was manufacturing three-inch shells for the Czar. After the Russian revolution, he took his wife and child to New York, where he made aircraft pontoons. The Kisevalters became U.S. citizens. Their son, George, was graduated from Dartmouth with a bachelor's degree in 1930 and, a year later, with a master's degree in civil engineering. Fresh out of Dartmouth, Kisevalter went to work for the New York City Parks Department, where he helped to build the Children's Zoo in Central Park. [2] After that, Kisevalter joined the Army. When World War II broke out, the Army, learning that Kisevalter spoke Russian, sent him to Alaska as a liaison officer with Soviet pilots who were ferrying some twelve thousand warplanes to the Soviets through Fairbanks. In Alaska, the planes were refitted with Soviet markings, red star decals on both sides of the fuselages. Halfway through the war, Kisevalter ran out of red stars, and, improvising, bought a supply of Texaco decals from the local gas station. "I bought the stars," he said, "we put them on, and said to the Russian pilots, 'Go ahead and fly Texaco.' They did." At the end of the war, Kisevalter was serving in G-2, Army intelligence in Germany. For two years, he worked with General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost), the branch of the German general staff that gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union. Kisevalter debriefed Gehlen, whom the CIA was to set up as head of West German intelligence, "on everything he knew about the Soviet army." Then Kisevalter left the Army and intelligence work for Nebraska, where for five years he grew alfalfa. [3] Kisevalter's farm-belt career was short-lived. In 1951, he joined the CIA, establishing the reputation that led him, a decade later, to the safe house in Geneva. Tennent Harrington "Pete" Bagley had arrived in Switzerland by a more conventional route. Bagley was handsome, cultivated, buttoned-down, and ambitious, with a quick, analytical mind and social and family credentials rooted in the Navy and Princeton. Then thirty-six, he had been born in Annapolis, the son of a vice-admiral. Two brothers also became admirals, one serving as vice-chief of naval operations, the other as commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe. His great-uncle Admiral William D. Leahy had served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime chief of staff. Instead of following family tradition, Bagley joined the Marines on his seventeenth birthday in 1942. After the war, he attended Princeton, but he got his bachelor's degree at the University of Southern California, and a doctorate in political science at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He joined the CIA in 1950, worked in Vienna for four years in the early fifties -- that was when he escorted Soviet defector Peter Deriabin back to Washington -- and was near the end of a four-year tour in Bern, where he had handled the Goleniewski letters, when Nosenko made contact in Geneva. Kisevalter and Bagley did not have to wait very long. "About two days after I arrived in Geneva," Kisevalter said, "Nosenko walks in one afternoon. He's in his thirties, nice-looking, brown hair, about five-ten, fairly muscular. He's very nervous, and starts drinking." The KGB man offered to sell information to the CIA for 900 Swiss francs, claiming he needed the money to replace KGB funds he had spent on a drinking bout. Later, Nosenko admitted he invented this story; he said he feared that an offer to give away information for nothing would be rejected as a provocation, as had sometimes happened in the past when KGB officers, acting under instructions, approached the CIA. Nosenko was not talking about defecting. "He wanted to go back home," Kisevalter said. "His daughter, Oksana, had a serious asthmatic condition, and the Kremlin clinic to which he had access told him the Soviets didn't have the medication that was needed. We called back to headquarters. There was none in the U.S. Finally, we found that there was some in Holland. We hired a pilot who flew to Geneva with the medication. Two years later, he claimed it saved her life." Belting straight Scotch, Nosenko began talking, disclosing information that he hoped would establish his bona fides with the two CIA officers. Early on, he revealed that Boris Belitsky, a prominent correspondent for Radio Moscow then being run as an agent by the CIA under the code name AEWIRELESS, was actually a double agent under KGB control. The revelation stunned Kisevalter, because he knew that only two years earlier, Belitsky had passed a CIA lie-detector test in a London safe house with flying colors. "The polygraph operator said Belitsky was absolutely okay," Kisevalter recalled. "He said, 'He could sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' through his asshole.'" Armed with that kind of unqualified reassurance, the CIA had been taking Belitsky's information at face value. [4] The correspondent had been recruited in 1958 at the Brussels World's Fair by George Goldberg, a CIA man who had been born in Latvia and spoke fluent Russian. By 1962, AEWIRELESS was being run by two case officers, Goldberg and Harry F. Young's. To prove his Point, Nosenko was able to name both CIA men to Kisevalter and Bagley. "Belitsky was in Geneva covering the disarmament meetings," Kisevalter recounted. "Nosenko said, laughing, 'You're not going to do anything about Belitsky because if they find out anything, I'm dead. If they even find out I'm here, I'm dead." For a time, Goldberg and Young were not told that their agent had been doubled, lest by a slip of the tongue or even by intonation or manner they tip off AEWIRELESS to the fact that the CIA now knew he was under KGB control. Boris Belitsky, by 1962 already a leading correspondent for Radio Moscow, was a slightly balding man of medium build who dressed like an English gentleman and spoke excellent English with an American accent. His father had been an overseas official of Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency, and Boris was educated in New York City. [6] Geneva was getting crowded. While Kisevalter and Bagley were meeting with Nosenko, Bruce Solie of the CIA's Office of Security, who was working closely with the Counterintelligence Staff in the mole hunt, flew in, hoping to ask Nosenko about penetrations. Kisevalter, fearing too many cooks, said he would do the asking, and he kept Solie out of the safe house. Kisevalter and Bagley knew nothing of Anatoly Golitsin's warnings about moles in the CIA and his specific allegations about "Sasha." Both CIA officers, however, said they remembered Solie passing along questions for Nosenko. "Solie gave me a whole shopping list of what to ask," Kisevalter recalled, "including several questions about Sasha. I met him in a bistro, an outdoor cafe, more than once. I told him whatever Nosenko had said on the subjects he was interested in." According to Bagley, Nosenko said he had no information about a KGB mole in the CIA named Sasha. Nosenko's interrogators pressed him as well on the matter of Vladislav Mikhailovich Kovshuk, the official of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate who had served in Washington in 1957 under the name of Vladimir Mikhailovich Komaroy. Golitsin had claimed that Kovshuk was of such senior rank that he could only have come to the United States to meet a high-ranking penetration. Could Nosenko shed any light on the Kovshuk mission? Nosenko said he could, that Kovshuk had been sent to Washington to contact a KGB source code-named ANDREY. But Nosenko described ANDREY as a low-Ievel source, 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. Even as Nosenko revealed the truth about AEWIRELESS, George Goldberg was meeting secretly with Belitsky in another safe house in Geneva, still blissfully unaware of what was going on. Belitsky passed what he claimed was classified information to Goldberg during a total of eighteen hours of debriefings in Geneva over a period of several days. Goldberg was finally told his agent had been compromised. Even after Nosenko's disclosure, the agency continued to run Belitsky, in part because the CIA considered it valuable during the Cuban missile crisis that October to see what kind of skewed information Belitsky was passing. But AEWIRELESS may have provided good information for two or three years after he was recruited. According to Goldberg, "Belitsky didn't report his CIA recruitment [to the KGB] until 1961 or 1962." He knew this, Goldberg said, because "Nosenko said Belitsky told him he was recruited by the CIA in England in 1961"-three years after his apparent recruitment by Goldberg in Brussels. As Nosenko continued to talk, he revealed other even more unsettling information: the case of the handsome Armenian. The KGB, he revealed, had followed someone from the American embassy in Moscow and had observed him checking a dead drop in an apartment lobby. "The Soviets called him the handsome Armenian," Kisevalter said. "But they knew his name. Nosenko also told his name. Abidian." Kisevalter immediately suspected, correctly, that the emergency drop of the CIA's most important agent had been compromised. He assumed that the hiding place that Nosenko was talking about was the Push kin Street drop that had been set up for Oleg Penkovsky. As the case officer handling Penkovsky, Kisevalter knew the significance of Nosenko's disclosure, and was dismayed. Since the emergency drop in the building lobby on Push kin Street had never been used, Kisevalter concluded the KGB did not yet know it was meant for Penkovsky. But the drop was now contaminated; the KGB knew its location. Kisevalter said nothing to Nosenko, of course, but in dispatches to the CIA from Geneva, he warned headquarters that the drop had been detected. "Abidian was cockier than he should have been," Kisevalter said. "He wanted to look at this place at night. An apartment lobby. But Abidian, unbeknownst to him, was under heavy surveillance. It was very dark. The lights were out or dim. They saw the Armenian nosing around. He was lighting matches, looking for the dead drop. That made it twice as suspicious. He came back and said, 'Yes, it's there.'" "The KGB elaborately staked out the lobby for six months. Workmen building false walls. Nosenko told me they watched it for six months. I asked him, 'What happened?' Nosenko replied, 'They ran out of powder.' In Russian, it means there were no results, the troops ran out of gunpowder. In other words, after a while they got tired of staking it out." [7] Nosenko also warned the CIA men that the walls of the American embassy in Moscow were honeycombed with forty-two microphones. "And he told us enough to find them," Kisevalter said. Golitsin had also spoken of microphones in the embassy; eventually the State Department announced that forty had been found. [8] As Nosenko talked about eavesdropping in the Moscow embassy, his own words, of course, were being picked up by Kisevalter's concealed microphones and tape-recorded. The two CIA officers held a series of meetings with Nosenko in the safe house over a period of several days. Kisevalter, because he was fluent in Russian, conducted the questioning. Bagley, although his Russian was limited, took notes. All of this was an elaborate charade; Nosenko undoubtedly assumed he was being taped, but the note-taking was designed to reassure him that he was not. As Nosenko's story emerged, it became clear that he was a product of the Soviet elite. His father, Ivan Isiderovich Nosenko, was Nikita Khrushchev's minister of shipbuilding. Yuri Nosenko was born in Nikolayev, a river port near the Black Sea, not far from Odessa, on October 30, 1927. His father was a self-made man who worked in the Odessa shipyards, studied at night, and became an engineer. His mother, the daughter of an architect, had more of an upper-class, intellectual background. In 1934, Nosenko's father moved the family to Leningrad, where he supervised a shipbuilding plant. Five years later, the family moved to Moscow, where the father had risen to minister of shipbuilding at the time of his death in 1956. But the senior Nosenko's career had been dealt a devastating blow two years earlier when Khrushchev scrapped the huge naval fleet that Stalin had ordered built. Two keels had already been laid for aircraft carriers. The construction program made little sense; the ships would have been obsolete, and no match for the U.S. Navy. Khrushchev's cutback left Ivan Nosenko with little to do. His father, Yuri Nosenko said, was so depressed that he spent the last months of his life on a couch, able only to sleep and sigh. But his son, with a high official for a father, had risen rapidly inside
the Soviet intelligence hierarchy. In 1942, during World War II, Yuri
Nosenko was sent to a naval preparatory school, and then to the naval
academy, where he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot to avoid
military service, according to a former CIA official.9 He was
nevertheless able to switch to Moscow's prestigious Institute of
International Relations, and was recruited into the GRU, which sent him
to the Far East as a Navy intelligence officer. In 1953, he joined the
KGB and took a wife, Ludmilla, the daughter of a prominent Communist
family. Nosenko offered no explanation of what had impelled him to contact the CIA, other than his story about the missing Swiss francs, which he later admitted was untrue. But whatever his motive, he had more information to impart. The KGB, he revealed, had penetrated British intelligence in Switzerland. Nosenko had a rather personal reason for knowing about this, according to Kisevalter. "It came about this way. Nosenko is playing around with a British secretary in Geneva who worked for MI5. [12] Yuri Ivanovich Guk, a KGB man who is in Geneva, runs into Nosenko. They are good friends. Nosenko tells Guk, 'She'd be a good piece of tail.' 'For chrissakes, Yuri,' Guk says, 'stay away from her, she's in British intelligence. What will happen when our man in MI5 reports back to Moscow that you're fooling around with her?' We didn't tell the British," Kisevalter said resignedly, because they would have insisted on knowing the source. "What could we say without blowing Nosenko inside out?" But the CIA did share news of another British penetration. A year earlier, Anatoly Golitsin had spoken of a Soviet spy in the British Admiralty. The ensuing investigation had narrowed the field of suspects, but had not pinpointed the mole. Now, Nosenko provided additional details that enabled the British, three months later in September of 1962, to arrest William John Vassall, a thirty-eight-year-old clerk in the Admiralty. [13] In 1954, Vassall had been sent to Moscow as clerk to the naval attache, who reported his work satisfactory despite "an irritating effeminate personality." Although his fellow employees called him "Vera" behind his back, apparently hardly anyone except the KGB realized he was a homosexual who could be blackmailed. In a statement to Special Branch, Vassall remembered being plied with brandy and photographed naked in bed with "two or three" male friends, he was not quite sure how many, in "several compromising sexual actions." The Russians used the photos to force him to spy, both in Moscow and later in London. When he wanted to get in touch with his Soviet contacts in London, he was told, he was to draw a circle on a tree with pink chalk. According to Kisevalter, what Nosenko knew was that "the man was in the Admiralty and that he was a homosexual. He explained to me how he found out. A Soviet case officer had returned home from England and received awards in Moscow. There was so much fanfare -- and jealousy -- that everybody speculated that man had had a big hit. Nosenko learned why, he picked it up in the corridors." Kisevalter questioned Nosenko in an effort to learn more about how much damage had been done by Edward Ellis Smith, the CIA 's first man in Moscow, who had been ensnared by his KGB maid and fired. Nosenko, according to both Kisevalter and Bagley, confirmed that Smith had been compromised. In fact, Nosenko said, since he had worked in the KGB section that targeted the American embassy, he had personally handled the Smith case. "Nosenko was running the girl, Valya," Kisevalter said. It was Nosenko who revealed that the KGB had code-named Smith "Ryzhiy," for his red hair. The KGB, as Kisevalter related it, forced one meeting with Smith and tried to set up another one. "Nosenko said Smith was reluctant to come to a second meeting. Nosenko asked the girl, 'Is he coming to the meeting?' Nosenko said she replied that 'he [Smith] was acting like Hamlet' about whether or not to come to the meeting." There were other disclosures. Golitsin had warned the CIA that a Canadian ambassador to Moscow was a homosexual. Now, Nosenko confirmed that the gay ambassador was John Watkins, a distinguished academic who had served in Moscow in the mid-1950s. According to Kisevalter, Nosenko told how Watkins and the Canadian foreign minister, Lester Pearson, had attended a dinner party at Nikita S. Khrushchev's dacha in the Crimea in 1955. As the vodka flowed, the Soviet leader began needling Watkins. "Khrushchev was plastered and made wise remarks about Watkins," Kisevalter continued. "He said, 'Not everybody here likes women.' " Among the guests was General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, head of the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, which targeted foreigners in the Soviet Union. "Gribanov was running Watkins and was ready to blow his stack," Kisevalter said. [14] Nosenko also described the KGB's operations in Geneva, an important intelligence base because of the frequent international meetings held there, many under the auspices of the United Nations units headquartered in that city. "Nosenko told us how many case officers they had in Geneva, how they operated in Geneva, the computers they used for surveillance. They monitored all police channels. And he told us they had a system of using rental cars in Geneva to avoid their own cars being spotted." In his meetings in the safe house in Geneva, Nosenko also revealed that the Soviets had penetrated a CIA operation against a KGB officer. The operation had begun when a woman agent working for the CIA in Vienna confessed to her handlers that she was having a dangerous love affair. "She had fallen in love with a Soviet KGB officer whom she met in the Soviet Union," Kisevalter said. "She told us of the love affair. The officer left Moscow and went by ship from Odessa to Piraeus to meet the girl in Vienna. The idea was to compromise the KGB officer. But since Nosenko knew of it, it meant the Soviet officer was under control." To Kisevalter, the case was yet another disclosure that "helped prove Nosenko's bona fides." One of Nosenko's allegations was too hot to handle, even for the CIA. According to Kisevalter, Nosenko told him that the Soviets "had the goods" on columnist Joseph Alsop, "a homosexual, and they have photos and if he gets out of line they can blackmail him if he doesn't write what they want. 'There is a sword over his head,' Nosenko said. So I went to Tom K. [Thomas H. Karamessines, at the time the CIA's assistant deputy director for plans]. He said cut it out of the tape and don't write it up. Because Alsop was a good friend of the President. He told me to cut it out of the tape, and I did." Alsop, one of Washington's most influential syndicated columnists, was not only a friend of President Kennedy but of many other prominent political figures. Urbane and erudite, he was also an art collector, art historian, and author. Whether or not the Soviets thought they could bring pressure on him, their efforts could hardly have been a success -- AIsop was a hardIine anti-Communist and severe critic of the Soviets in all of his writings. [15] He constantly warned that the Soviets were ahead of the United States militarily, and that Washington faced a "missile gap." He died in August 1989 at his Georgetown home at the age of seventy-eight. [16] Nosenko also talked about the KGB's "litra" system, the use of certain chemicals in secret operations. "Nosenko said Soviet counterintelligence used litra to mark people's mail or their location," Kisevalter said. "An embassy employee is waiting for a light to cross the street. A nice old lady is standing next to him, also waiting to cross. She presses a button on a vial and a little stream of liquid hits his shoes. Later on, dogs-collies and shepherds-follow the man, they can pick up his trail." [17] As the conversations with Nosenko in Geneva neared their end, the CIA men worked out a plan for future meetings. "He agreed to recontact," Kisevalter said. "He insisted that there be no recontact in the Soviet Union," where surveillance by his own KGB officers made such an attempt highly dangerous. "Five or six agents, Russians working for the CIA, had been lost as a result of recontact in the Soviet Union," Kisevalter said. "Now we had to set up a commo plan for Nosenko. Before I left Geneva, I contacted the OS [Office of Security] and got some high-security addresses and cable routes in New York. The address we used was in Manhattan. A person who was an agency asset. With these commo plans, I made arrangements with Nosenko to recontact us from anywhere in the free world to the New York address by cable or mail." Nosenko was instructed to sign his message "Alex." "Three days after he sent the cable, we'd meet at seven P.M. under the marquee of a movie house with a name that began with the highest [closest to the letter A] letter in the alphabet in the city the cable was sent from." [18] And so they parted. "We gave Nosenko a bolt of cloth, for his wife to make a dress. We had done that before with other walk-ins. He said thank you for the medicine, and yes he had memorized the address in New York." Kisevalter and Bagley were taking no chances on losing the record of Nosenko's debriefings. "We left Geneva on different planes," Kisevalter said. "One of us took the notes and one took the tapes." Both Bagley and Kisevalter returned to Langley believing they had pulled off a major coup-a KGB officer was spilling secrets in profusion, and, rare among Soviet intelligence officers, had agreed to re main as an agent-in-place of sorts. While he had ruled out any contact in Moscow, he had agreed to an eventual recontact with the CIA. While it is always vastly more desirable from Langley's viewpoint for an agent-in-place to continue to feed information from within the KGB, Nosenko met the CIA halfway; he would be back, which was preferable to what happened in the case of most walk-ins, such as Golitsin, who insisted on defecting to the West immediately. Defectors could be debriefed and milked for all they knew, but there came a time when they wound down and ran out of information. To the CIA, an agent-in-place, even one on a hold button like Nosenko, was a far better asset. The two case officers were excited about the take: AEWIRELESS, the revelation that Boris Belitsky had been doubled against the agency and would not, after all, be singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the unusual manner suggested by his polygraph operator; the case of the handsome Armenian, and the grave danger that Kisevalter felt it posed for the Penkovsky operation; the microphones in the walls of the American embassy in Moscow; the penetration of British intelligence in Switzerland; the information that was to lead to the arrest of William John Vassall, the clerk in the British Admiralty; the new detail about the sexual compromise of Edward Ellis Smith, the CIA 's first man in Moscow; the Soviet penetration of the CIA's efforts to turn the supposedly lovestruck KGB officer in Vienna; the KGB's rental cars and other tradecraft in Geneva; the litra system -- the list was impressive. Bagley was walking on air as he reported to James Angleton on his meetings in Geneva with Nosenko. Angleton greeted him with all the enthusiasm of a father whose small son had triumphantly dragged home a dead alley cat. There was room in Angleton's pantheon of defectors for only one god. Anatoly Golitsin had predicted this; he had warned that other defectors or agents would be dispatched to deflect from his warnings of a mole in the CIA. To the counterintelligence chief, Nosenko had done just that by his explanation of Kovshuk's visit to Washington, and by his insistence that he knew of no Soviet agent code-named Sasha working for the CIA. "When I came back I thought we had a genuine one," Bagley said. "I was enthusiastic about Nosenko. Angleton said, 'Before your next meeting I'd like you to see the file on another defector. Golitsin.' I read the file, and I came out and said, 'There's something wrong. I think we've got a bad one.'" Later, it was said that Angleton had used all of his formidable powers of persuasion to influence Bagley and convert the younger man to his view. It did not happen in precisely that way, according to Bagley. "There was no Svengali," Bagley said. But it was Angleton who had turned him around? "No," Bagley replied. "The information turned me around." [19] A hairline fault had opened within the CIA that in time was to become a cataclysmic earthquake. From that moment on, a faction within the CIA, led by Angleton, with Bagley at his side, was to hew to the unshakable conviction that Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was a plant under KGB control. The "war of the defectors" had begun. But in a real sense, the war was not about the conflict over the bona fides of Anatoly Golitsin and Yuri Nosenko, although that was the battleground on which it was so bitterly fought. The war was really about moles. ___________________ Notes: 1. The amount of alcohol flowing at this and subsequent meetings in Geneva later became an issue in the Nosenko case. "It was not a boozing party," Bagley said. "He wasn't drunk at any of the meetings." But Nosenko later claimed he had been drunk during his conversations with the CIA. John L. Hart, a CIA witness to a House committee, said Nosenko had "four or five" Scotch and sodas before the meetings and that the Russian blamed alcohol for his having given answers that exaggerated his importance in the KGB. "... At all these meetings I was snookered ... I was drunk," Hart quoted Nosenko as saying. Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, Vol. II, 1978, p. 491. 2. Kisevalter's zoo phase gave rise to tales, still believed by some inside the CIA -- but untrue -- that he had designed the bear cages at the Bronx Zoo. 3. Kisevalter, even in 1990, talked enthusiastically about the virtues of alfalfa. "We would heat it with gas drums, grind it into a powder, and extract vitamin A," he reminisced. "Mixed with corn, it is invaluable for poultry as chicken feed. Vitamin A is the vital thing a chicken needs. Chickens used to taste fishy because they were fed cod liver oil. But chickens that are fed alfalfa meal don't taste fishy. It's excellent for dogs and cats too. Alfalfa is no longer needed, of course; now they use synthetic vitamin A for chickens." 4. There were doubts about Belitsky in some quarters, however, despite his remarkable performance in London. For example, the reports officer In the Soviet division who handled the take from the Russian concluded he was a plant. Within the division, Belitsky remained a controversial asset. 5. Young left the CIA in 1965, became a history professor at the University of Indiana, and later wrote Prince Lichnowsky and the Great War (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1977), a book about Karl Max Furst von Lichnowsky, the German ambassador to London who tried to prevent the outbreak of World War I. 6. By 1989, Belitsky was deputy chief of Radio Moscow's department that broadcast to Great Britain and North America. Belitsky spent considerable time in England and was a well-known figure on British television. In 1965, he Came up with a wildly improbable explanation of Britain's 1963 "Great Train Robbery." The $7.8 million heist, Belitsky said in a broadcast from Moscow, had been carried out not by common criminals, but by the British secret service to finance its clandestine operations. 7. Bagley insisted that Nosenko did not mention the dead drop in these initial meetings in Geneva in 1962 but only at a later meeting in 1964, by which time Penkovsky had been arrested. Kisevalter was equally adamant that Nosenko had revealed the KGB's knowledge of the drop in 1962. Nosenko himself appeared unable to resolve the matter. Former CIA officer Donald Jameson, who discussed the question with Nosenko in June 1991, said Nosenko remembered that the drop had been under KGB surveillance twenty-four hours a day. "But he said, 'I honestly don't remember whether I mentioned it in '62 or '64. It was something I knew about before '62, and logically I would have mentioned it, but I don't recall.'" There was no conflict, however, over the substance of Nosenko's disclosure; both Kisevalter and Bagley agreed that Nosenko said that the KGB had spotted Abidian at the drop. 8. The microphones looked like wheels from a roller skate, and were painted gunmetal gray. In the center of each, a tube about the size of a drinking straw projected outward to just behind the plaster to funnel the sound to the microphones. In some cases, pinholes had been made in the plaster to enhance the transmission of sound. The State Department announced the discovery of the microphones on May 19, 1964. Presumably, they had been uncovered some time earlier. 9. Leonard V. McCoy, "Yuriy Nosenko, CIA" (Fort Myer, Va.: CIRA Newsletter, Volume XII, No.3, Fall 1987, published by Central Intelligence Retirees' Association), p. 19. Nosenko gives a different version of the incident. In 1991 he told Donald Jameson, another former CIA official, that he shot himself in the left hand while playing with a pistol and was soon afterward dismissed as a naval cadet. Nosenko claimed the shooting was accidental. 10. Nosenko was on temporary duty in Geneva to keep an eye on the members of the Soviet disarmament delegation. Normally, he was assigned to the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, and would seldom have had reason to travel outside the Soviet Union. " After Golitsin defected," Kisevalter said, "the Soviets said that any group of five or more traveling abroad will have a watchdog from the Second Chief Directorate. Nosenko told us that." 11. For additional details about Nosenko's background, see Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post War Defectors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), pp. 179-83, and Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings, Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, Vol. II, 1978, pp. 439-43. 12. MI5, the British security service, is responsible for internal security but does have representatives abroad, although far fewer than MI6, the British secret intelligence service. MI5 is rough1y equivalent to the FBI and MI6 to the CIA. 13. Members of the Counterintelligence Staff discounted the value of Nosenko's leads in the Vassall case. "Golitsin gave us information on Vassall," Angleton's deputy, Scotty Miler, said. "Nosenko's information put the final nail in the coffin. They almost had him. He would have been caught anyway." 14. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) later interrogated Watkins, who had retired from the foreign service, he said he was gay and had engaged in homosexual liaisons in the Soviet Union, but denied he had given secrets to the KGB or favored the Soviet Union, either as ambassador or later as assistant undersecretary for external affairs in Ottawa. The interrogation of Watkins began in Paris, where he was living, and continued in London and Canada. It was winding down when on October 12,1964, he died suddenly of a heart attack in his Montreal hotel room in the presence of his two RCMP interrogators. The CIA had little doubt, but no proof, that he had been compromised. For a detailed account of the Watkins case, see John Sawatsky, For Services Rendered (Ontario, Canada: Penguin, 1986), pp. 172-83. 15. It was not only the Kremlin that took notice of Alsop's sexual preference, whatever it might have been. The Eisenhower White House as well was interested in the columnist's private life. In December 1959, on the eve of Eisenhower's state visit to India, his press secretary, James C. Hagerty, took a colleague of Alsop's aside during a reception at the White House. Hagerty was enraged. "I'm taking Alsop off this trip," he told the correspondent. "Did you see that piece he wrote? I'm going to lift his White House pass. He's a damn fairy. The FBI knows about him." 16. Friends of Alsop, even those who knew him for a long time, could shed little light on the subject. Tom Lambert, a foreign correspondent and colleague of Alsop's on the New York Herald Tribune, said he had heard the story about Alsop and the Russians. "I heard the Russians had the pictures, that they caught him with some young man," Lambert said. Lambert was covering the Korean War for the Associated Press when he first met Alsop, and although he knew the columnist well for some forty years, he had no idea whether Alsop was gay. "If he was, Joe certainly never spoke of it." Don Cook, the Trib's correspondent in Paris for many years, said, "My own guess is he [Alsop] was really pretty asexual. He was so self-centered he just couldn't fit a relationship with a woman into his life. I don't know how active he was pursuing women, but he certainly didn't pursue men. And he was married for several years to Susan Mary Pat ten." But, Cook added, he didn't really know. 17. As Kisevalter explained it, litra was a precursor of the "spy dust" that the KGB employed to track Western diplomats and journalists and their contacts. The disclosure by the United States in August 1985 that the Soviets were using the spy dust caused a furor at the time. The chemical, nitrophenylpentadienal (NPPD), was an invisible powder that the Soviets sprinkled on the steering wheels or doorknobs of American diplomats -- presumably including CIA officers in the Moscow station -- so that tiny traces would be left on the hands or clothing of Soviet citizens with whom they came in contact. U.S. government scientists analyzed and tested the substance for six months and concluded early in 1986 that in the levels used by the Soviets, the spy dust "does not pose a health hazard." The tests also found that luminol, a second tracking chemical used by the KGB, was not dangerous to humans. 18. If Nosenko chose to recontact the CIA by letter or postcard, the procedure varied slightly, since there was no way to judge how long it would take for the mail to reach Manhattan. So if Nosenko recontacted by letter or card, he was instructed to date the letter several days later than the day on which he actually mailed it. The meeting would take place three days after the false date he wrote on the letter. 19. As Bagley was later to testify to a House committee, "Alone, Nosenko looked good to me ... seen alongside [Golitsin) whose reporting I had not seen before coming to headquarters after the 1962 meetings with Nosenko, Nosenko looked very odd indeed." 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. 594.
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