Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (2007)

by Tennent (Pete) H. Bagley

Reviewed by Leonard McCoy, retired CIA Soviet Division Reports Officer

This review appeared in CIRA (Central Intelligence Retirees Association) Newsletter, Summer 2007 edition, Vol XXXII, Number 2

In this book, after forty years of reviewing the case, the author undertakes to justify the mishandling of the only important operational assignment he had in 22 years of employment in the Clandestine Service of CIA. As the Soviet Division counterintelligence chief, later deputy division chief, he was responsible for the false conclusion that one of the most valuable Soviet KGB defectors we ever had, Yuriy Nosenko, was not bona fide. He had participated directly with case officer George Kisevalter when George was sent out from HQ to debrief Nosenko in May and June 1962 and again as of the time of his defection in January 1964. The author subsequently directed the team of Soviet Division officers who carried out the interrogations and conducted the analysis of the results, and personally maintained liaison on the case with the conspiracy-minded chief of the Counterintelligence Staff, James Angle-ton (JJA). This false allegation that Nosenko was dispatched against CIA as a deception agent was an immense disservice to national security, with ramifications resulting in significant obstruction of the Warren Commission, espionage investigations by the FBI and allied intelligence agencies, and in serious negative impact on clandestine operations against the USSR, at the height of the Cold War.

Having left CIA by 1972, the author has spent some time over the past 35 years trying to develop additional overt evidence for his sadly mistaken judgment 40 years ago. Nevertheless, in this account, the author has to resort to the same transparently invalid analytical methodology as was used in the original case he made against Nosenko beginning in 1964. He expands on and inflates his fatally flawed basic theory and represents as factual a series of postulates, assumptions, speculations, and hypotheses to support his theory which descend ever deeper into fantasy. The main such desperate arguments are:

a. The KGB had an agent in CIA, probably in the Soviet Division, which Nosenko was sent out to help validate and protect.

b. Without any important exception, all existing, even potential, Soviet defectors and CIA assets were actually controlled by the KGB. The main case against them was that, almost to a man, they supported Nosenko's bona fides. One of those, a two-star GRU general, provided valuable intelligence for 24 years before Ames compromised him and he was executed—Bagley's explanation: the asset got tired of working for the KGB and became loyal to us.

c. All the respected senior, objective, CIA annuitants assigned to review the Nosenko and associated cases in 1976 were inexperienced and/or incompetent, so they were wrong in concluding that Nosenko was bona fide. Cleve Cram did the history, Bronson Tweedy did Golitsyn, Jack Fieldhouse did Loginov, Hart did Nosenko himself—all are now gone, though some of their team members may still be around. For his harshest attack, Bagley singles out John Hart, the former chief of European Division, where most of our Soviet operations were conducted, since Hart was selected to set up the team which carried out the thorough and expert review of the Nosenko case itself. Hart later presented his findings to Congress, and summarized them and related cases in his book, The CIA's Russians. When he went to Brussels to interview Bagley, Bagley refused to talk to him. Bagley excoriates him as the leader of "Nosenko's defenders," a fraternity which was never established. Hart never raised the case with me.

d. December 1961 KGB defector Golitsyn provided information of liaison services, while Nosenko provided essentially duplicative information to bolster his bona fides or detract from Golitsyn's.

e. Repeated analyses and reviews of the timing and basis for compromise of the Popov and Penkovskiy cases are incorrect, misled by planted KGB information regarding their surveillance of these two assets in Moscow. Penkovskiy was his own worst enemy, rejecting any cautionary advice from his British and American case officers. In one incident late in the operation, when he was to have an official meeting with his British cutout, Wynne, he noticed that Wynne was under KGB surveillance as they approached one another at a Moscow restaurant, so he waved Wynne off—what was the KGB supposed to think?

It would take another book, and access to classified CIA and FBI records, to assemble and record all of the relevant information which proves unequivocally that the author is wrong in every one of these assertions which constitute the foundation of his wearying self defense. Just to comment on his selective KGB officer testimony, he is as aware as anyone that no former KGB officer would dare provide him accurate information on their past operations, or their knowledge of ours. He also knows, even seems to argue, when it suits his case, that if his case against Nosenko had any genuine basis, practically no KGB officer would have known about it, only a very few high-level KGB chiefs. The official KGB(SVR) attitude toward any such comments by their retired officers would surely be to assure that CIA would look bad, so the message KGB would peddle would most likely be that they had fooled CIA, and that the author was right all the time.

Contrary to the author's statement, review of Golitsyn's case by objective and experienced officers determined that, had he not defected, the loss to US national security would have been practically nil. His persistently vague leads started investigations which never led directly to arrests; in fact, he was allowed by Angleton to have access to whatever CIA documents he felt he needed, including an extensive series of personal documents on CIA officers. The investigations Angleton then initiated on the basis of Golitsyn's thus well stimulated and paranoid imagination led to false accusations against officers in CIA and the allied services of Norway, Canada, England, France, Holland, Australia, and Germany, resulting in major damage to liaison relationships. Bagley gives Golitsyn credit for exposing Soviet deception agent Belitskiy, whom Nosenko compromised in June 1962. Not so. In fact, while working with the Penkovskiy team in London when Belitskiy was there as Gagarin's interpreter, headquarters directed me to work with the case officer, polygrapher, and MI-5 on the Belitskiy case. Following the meetings and a "no deception indicated" polygraph of Belitskiy, I drafted a long cable which stated that Belitskiy was a deception agent. This conclusion was accepted only after Nosenko confirmed it a year later. It was Nosenko's reporting on microphones in the American Embassy which led to the destruction of the political officer's office and tracking the wires to the embassy roof, leading by chance to wires into the new embassy annex under construction of which Nosenko was actually unaware.

To dispute each of Bagley's main points, especially in even more depth, would be entertaining, but would require another book. As it turns out, the incontrovertible proof that his 40 years of research and writing were wasted, and that a little more thought on his part would have prevented his having mishandled the Nosenko case, is unwittingly provided by him in his book:

"Nosenko's conduct led me to query an Agency psychologist, John Gittinger: From his own conversations with Nosenko and the accounts of Nosenko's handlers, Gittinger recognized signs of a sociopathic personality and handed me some published works on the subject by reputed psychologists . I was startled to find them veritable lists of Nosenko's characteristics. His superficial charm, insincere smile, and frequent touch on his listener's hand or arm fit the description of a sociopath's self-centeredness and apparent incapacity for real attachment, which fit with Nosenko's evident forgetting of the family left behind. Nosenko's striking absence of remorse, anxiety, or other emotions struck a chord. So did his quick mood shifts, another sociopathic symptom. Especially striking was his indifference to truth. Nosenko would readily and quickly change his stories whenever they were challenged by contrary fact, sometimes shifting to blatant improvisation. His rude and vulgar behavior in public places after a few drinks also fit the mold." 

That should have been the end of any routine interrogation or evaluation of the case against Nosenko, and of this book. Otherwise, we are led to believe that the judgment of the KGB leadership which had conceived and implemented the classic deception operations the author describes had degenerated to the point where they would search vigorously and carefully through the several thousand prospects in KGB ranks and select a person of this description, whom they knew from having employed him for ten years, to send out to deceive CIA and, above all, to defuse the World War III overtones surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy by Oswald after he returned from residence in the USSR. This diagnosis leads to the simple explanation for Nosenko's behavior and all inconsistencies or contradictions in his series of interrogations—he was behaving just as he had all his life—in the sociopathic mindset which he had evolved to deal successfully with the peculiarities of Communist society, just as Golitsyn took on paranoid characteristics for the same reason. As the son of a government minister, not to mention his KGB employment, Nosenko had been a teflon youth—free to behave pretty much as he pleased, immune from guidance, control, or interference by police or other authorities charged with maintaining order in Soviet society. Woe be unto the person who dared to challenge his statements or demand that he be punished for his behavior or give a coherent, detailed explanation for anything he had said or done. He could hardly be expected to change his entire dysfunctional personality just to please his single-minded CIA interrogators.

The reversal of the disastrous false case against Nosenko began with my review of the case in autumn 1965. It has become accepted history that there was some sort of battle within CIA, which would mean the Clandestine Service, over Nosenko's bona fides. Nothing of the sort happened. In the first place, the "thousand pages" of memos which recorded the results and conclusions of the interrogations of Nosenko over his first year after defection were very closely guarded—anyone who raised a question at all was reminded that he was not, and could not be, privy to all the facts. When division chief Murphy decided in autumn 1965, after Nosenko's incarceration, that it was necessary for me to understand and support the case against him, he ordered the two notebooks full of memos delivered to me. Expecting to be convinced, I found instead that the case was a total misunderstanding by the author's team of the personality they were dealing with, analytically just as contradictory and inconsistent as Nosenko's own statements. The memo which I wrote to make this case was confiscated by Murphy.

As reports on Nosenko's confinement came to me from the premier Soviet Division case officer, Dick Kovich, then assigned to the Farm by Angleton (Golitsyn's charges) because of false suspicion of treason, I became ever more concerned, and took the surviving copy of my memo to Helms, then Clandestine Service chief (DD/P) in May 1966. He called me the next day and asked if I would agree to let him pass the memo to Gittinger, and I naturally agreed. After Gittinger had read the memo, we had the first of many meetings on the case, in which he observed that the case had been completely mishandled, riding roughshod over Nosenko's irrational mental state, and stated repeatedly that his conclusion had been that Nosenko was who he said he was, that he had indeed served in the KGB as he claimed, and that he was in fact bona fide. When Helms, as DCI, held an interagency award meeting for Gittinger, attended by senior officers from throughout the Intelligence Community, he stated that Gittinger had helped him to resolve the most difficult case he had ever faced—Nosenko. As I approached Gittinger in the line to congratulate him, he said: "Len, this medal belongs to you." If there were other officers contesting the case against Nosenko, as I have read in books such as Mangold's generally reliable Cold Warrior, I never met any of them. Two of the division officers whose cases were judged to be doubled against us by the KGB did advise me that they absolutely disagreed with those evaluations by the division management—Murphy and Bagley. In 1967, when Bagley called the senior Soviet Division operations officers together so he could brief them on the imminent combination of the Soviet and East European' divisions, he presented his case against Nosenko and the fatal consequences of this "Soviet deception operation" (Nosenko) for our operations. The officers walked out of the meeting en masse and advised the DCI that Bagley had become a protégé of Angleton and was undermining our operations.

Still concerned by Kovich's regular reports of the continued harsh conditions of Nosenko's solitary incarceration and interrogation, I drafted another memo, to now-DCI Helms, summarizing the sophism of the case against him and recommending that he at least be released under some probationary status. By this time, the Soviet Division had set up a separate team to review the case in terms of my memo. Helms said that he had now assigned the case to DDCI Taylor for resolution, who, in turn, had assigned it to Security chief Osborne, a former Soviet Division chief, and that Bruce Solie of that office would review the case. Solie had been assigned to work with the FBI on Soviet cases instead of their being handed over, as was normally the case, to the Soviet Division, for the period of over three years when Angleton (Golitsyn) was conducting an investigation of a large number of Soviet Division officers falsely suspected of working for the KGB. Solie and I never discussed the case, but he reached the same conclusion Gittinger and I had, that Nosenko had been mishandled and was bona fide. Nosenko was then released and subsequently exploited eagerly and gratefully by the FBI, and his other leads and KGB expertise were incorporated into CIA operations and training. The case was also reviewed in Nosenko's favor by the Inspector General, identified by name only by Bagley, and belittled as is the author's custom when citing those who disagreed with him, but who had in fact served as chief in Germany and division chief, so his qualifications were hardly as meager as Bagley states. Gittinger once commented that the more than three years which Nosenko spent in solitary confinement may have been the best treatment for Nosenko's mental imbalance, although inhumanely drastic. As of the time I left the Headquarters assignment where I was responsible for evaluating all of the above cases, and our other Soviet cases up to 1978, all sources supported Nosenko's identity and KGB service. Upon my retirement and reemployment to conduct the Counterintelligence Operations course in 1987, this was still true. When former KGB officer Gordiyevskiy accepted my invitation to speak at the course, as well as in a subsequent meeting with former KGB General Kalugin some months ago, they took the same position.

To my knowledge, prior to his Soviet Division CI assignment, Bagley had essentially no experience with Soviet defectors or agents. However, the case against Nosenko, and the painful, unprofessional, fundamentally illegal, disposition of it was actually inspired and stage-managed by Angleton. Shortly after my assignment to the CI Staff, he came to my office and asked me to come in for a discussion. His subject was Nosenko. He stated that after the first Kisevalter/Bagley meetings in Geneva in June 1962, Bagley came rushing into his office to announce excitedly that he had just come back to Headquarters to report on the best Soviet case CIA would ever have. Angleton said scornfully that after letting this "eager young officer" finish his boasting and calm down, he told him that he had some papers he would like him to read. Then, he said, he sat Bagley down outside his office door to read (Golitsyn's reports) for three days (Bagley said in the CI conference room), after which Bagley came into Angleton crestfallen, announcing that Nosenko was a deception operation. Thus did the case against Nosenko begin. Having recruited Bagley to his view of the Nosenko case, Angleton was encouraged to use Golitsyn to launch the vast, disastrous campaign against practically every Soviet asset and defector that CIA or the FBI was running, resulting in the crippling of operations against the USSR during the period of its greatest threat to the US, damaging relations with liaison services as stated above, ruining the careers and lives of their individual officers and in CIA, and flouting available intelligence to declare the Sino-Soviet split a Communist conspiracy ( which Angleton advised me was also true of supposed Soviet disputes with Albania, Yugoslavia, and Romania). An example of the prevailing operational doctrine is an event which occurred on a Saturday in 1967, when a cable came in reporting the walk-in of a Soviet technician demonstrating access to information directly responsive to a Priority National Intelligence Objective. Murphy stated that it was an obvious KGB ploy, ignored my argument that it was an invaluable opportunity which should be followed up, and directed the field station to drop all contact with the walk-in. Over two years later, unbeknownst to me at the time, the incoming cable was resurrected, the walk-in was contacted clandestinely in the USSR, and provided valuable information for several years.

The worst individual action of all by Angleton was probably his initiative to return Soviet Illegal Loginov, who was cooperating with us, to the Soviets. When I learned of this plan and called DCI Helms to protest, he said irritably that Angleton was handling it, it was out of his hands. Fortunately, Loginov's life was saved on a Soviet legal technicality. All such significant Soviet cases were reviewed by the staff which replaced Angleton and his senior officers in late 1974, reaching the shocking conclusion that not one of Angleton's decisions on the major cases cited during his 20 years of stewardship of the CI Staff was correct. The incorrect decision least palatable to me was his ultimate conclusion, stated to the universally respected annuitant who wrote up the history of Angleton's 20 years of feckless management of the CI Staff—that since I was responsible for the unraveling of the case against Nosenko which led to his being relieved of his job, I was the KGB penetration of CIA which he had been looking for. My association with him, from an initial positive contact in 1956, through several meetings with him before he retired in September 1975, left me with the genuine impression that this was a remarkable, exceptionally gifted human being whom history had condemned to spend his entire adult life in the wrong profession.

Bagley declares CIA and the FBI to be wrong about Nosenko and belittles the findings of experienced and competent officers, selected for their objectivity, who disagreed with his case against Nosenko. He questions my own counterintelligence qualifications (" a junior reports officer"), which were based primarily on my responsibility for input to the bona fides evaluation of every asset or defector we had over the ten years before the Nosenko events, but his own are just as suspect, as his assignments, apart from shadowing the Popov case in Vienna, afforded him practically no substantive involvement with Soviet assets or defectors. "Junior"?— in 1966 he and I had the same rank, and by the time he retired six years later, having been struck from the promotion list by DCI Helms, I outranked him by two grades. And where were the CI experts? Practically no one in the CI Staff, including Angleton, had ever been involved in Soviet operations, but could only monitor them in the SR Division cable traffic for which they were on distribution. Angleton's British counterpart in Rome during the immediate postwar years, responsible for briefing Angleton on the British sensitive "X" product, informed me during our collaboration on the Penkovskiy operation that Angleton blundered in every operation he ran. So how did he and his staff become experts? Where were their successes? (After resolution of the Nosenko case, the CI Staff was taken off distribution of operational cable traffic, only informed orally in general terms of operational developments). However, the analytical methodology of the Staff which had led to the series of operational and personnel catastrophes which followed on Angleton and Golitsyn's becoming soulmates in 1962 remained alive and well, finally taking an astounding turn—following the same CI "logic," Angleton's senior CI Staff analysts made just as persuasive cases that Bagley, Murphy, even Angleton himself, were actually the KGB penetrations of CIA that they had been searching for!