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Last Updated: Sep 7, 2008 - 8:06:17 AM |
James Jesus Angleton, aficionado of poetry and former director of
counterintelligence for the CIA, quoted TS Eliot to describe the
ambiguous world of espionage as a "wilderness of mirrors". But Angleton
himself got trapped in the infinite reflections of paranoia implicit in
his trade by the defection of the KGB agent Yuri Nosenko, who has died
aged 80.
The argument about whether Nosenko was bona fide or a KGB plant would,
according to David Wise's Molehunt (1992), "split the agency into two
camps, creating scars that had yet to heal decades later". Indeed, just
last year, in his book Spy Wars, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, Nosenko's
original CIA handler, continued to argue that Nosenko was a KGB
"provocateur and dissembler", which caused the CIA director Michael
Hayden to visit Nosenko just a month before his death, bringing a
ceremonial flag and official letter of thanks.
The CIA's apologies actually began in 1969, after they'd held Nosenko
in solitary confinement for 3½ years. He was subjected to many of the
interrogation techniques now familiar to the public from Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib. Eventually cleared, he would be exonerated by the then
director Stansfield Turner in 1978, long after internal reports about
his treatment had become part of the so-called "family jewels"
documents that prompted congressional investigations by the Pike and
Church committees.
Another defector, Oleg Kalugin, said that anyone who doubted Nosenko
showed "a complete ignorance of the KGB", a view confirmed by Oleg
Gordievsky, a KGB agent who worked for British intelligence, and now
lives in Britain. "I was a young officer when Nosenko defected," he
says, "and it hit like a nuclear bomb. It was so unusual that someone
so high-ranking would defect. He was genuine, and gave the Americans
40% of their information about our counterintelligence; it is such
stupidity to believe he was 'sent'."
Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was born in the Black Sea port of Nikolaev. His
father was, for nearly 20 years, the Soviet minister of shipbuilding.
His mother hired private tutors to teach Yuri western literature: he
graduated from the state institute of international relations, and,
after three years in naval intelligence, joined the KGB in 1953.
In 1961, as a member of the Soviet delegation to disarmament talks in
Geneva, Nosenko was robbed of $200 by a prostitute. Desperate to repay
the money before his KGB expenses were due, he approached a US official
he knew from Moscow, offering to sell secrets. Nosenko claimed to be a
lieutenant colonel in the second chief directorate, or
counterintelligence, in Moscow. Bagley, who spoke no Russian, was
rushed to Geneva, along with a Russian-speaker from headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, whose tape recorder malfunctioned. Nosenko told them
about listening devices at the US embassy in Moscow, and confirmed the
identities of the British Admiralty clerk John Vassall, the Canadian
ambassador John Watkins and the CIA agent Edward Ellis Smith, all
compromised in KGB "honeytrap" stings, which had been revealed by an
earlier defector, Anatoliy Golitsin.
But Nosenko denied Golitsin's claim of another Soviet mole higher up in
the Admiralty, and refused to defect on the grounds he would not leave
his wife and children behind. Still, Bagley characterised Nosenko as
"totally convincing".
Angleton, however, had suffered a string of reverses, not least when
his drinking chum Kim Philby was revealed to be a Soviet agent. His two
top CIA assets within the KGB had been executed, and Angleton's West
German counterpart, Heinz Felfe, turned out to be a Soviet spy.
Golitsin was his major success. Gordievsky, however, describes Golitsin
as "a young and inexperienced officer". In order to protect his status,
Golitsin warned that the KGB might send a second defector to discredit
him, and Angleton convinced Bagley that Nosenko was a fraud.
Then, in February 1964, as the Warren commission into the assassination
of John F Kennedy began hearing witnesses, Nosenko, again in Geneva,
suddenly announced that he would defect, claiming Moscow had recalled
him. He said he had personally handled Lee Harvey Oswald's KGB file,
but rejected him as "too unstable". This was potential dynamite,
confirming the "lone, crazed assassin" thesis that the Warren
commission set out to prove, but Angleton and Bagley were unmoved. They
argued that Nosenko had inflated his rank, and that intercepts revealed
no order to recall him. They believed Nosenko was a fake and would
reveal the truth of all Golitsin's claims, including the identification
of Harold Wilson as a Soviet asset. But they faced another problem: the
FBI had their own KGB defector, codenamed Fedora, who corroborated
Nosenko. Angleton risked going out on a limb within the agency by
opposing the FBI's William Harvey, who ran Fedora, and J Edgar Hoover
himself.
Still, when Nosenko arrived in the US, the CIA's Soviet Russia division
spirited him away to begin his 1,277-day ordeal. Results of his many
polygraph examinations were inconclusive, and eventually CIA director
Richard Helms demanded a resolution. After characterising Golitsin as
paranoid, in late 1968 an internal CIA investigation cleared Nosenko,
and, in 1969, he was released, given a new identity and a lump sum
payment. Even in his new life, his drinking and womanising would be a
problem for his new employers. But a decade later, in his only public
speech, at the CIA, Nosenko said he bore no resentment over his
treatment and considered the US to be humanity's best hope. Gordievsky
calls it "the most shameful page in the history of the CIA".
The arguments for Nosenko's being a plant are thin. He could not undo
Golitsin, and if the KGB worried that Oswald was a clumsy attempt to
frame them for Kennedy's assassination, it could be countered through
back-channels. Yet Nosenko's crippling of American intelligence could
not have been more effective had the KGB orchestrated it. The
increasingly paranoid Angleton would suspect the likes of Pierre
Trudeau, Olaf Palme and Willi Brandt of being Soviet agents. When he
started suspecting his own superiors at the CIA, he was forced into
retirement.
KGB assets within the agency, such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanson,
would be exposed not by counterintelligence, but by their own
over-confidence. And Nosenko would die, under an assumed name after "a
long illness".
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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