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From: "Mario Profaca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: September 1, 2008 5:44:38 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Obituary: Yuri Nosenko
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/01/russia
Yuri Nosenko
KGB agent and defector at the centre of a dramatic cold war episode
* Michael Carlson
* The Guardian,
* Monday September 1 2008
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".
· Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, KGB agent, born October 30 1927; died August
23 2008
About this article
Obituary: Yuri Nosenko
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday September 01 2008 on
p33 of the Obituaries section. It was last updated at 00:01 on
September 01 2008.
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