Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (Russian: Юрий Иванович Носенко; October 30, 1927 – August 23, 2008)^[1] was a putative KGB officer who ostensibly defected to the United States in 1964. Controversy arose as to whether or not he was a KGB "plant," and he was held in detention by the CIA for over three years before he was finally deemed a true defector. After his release he became an American citizen and worked as a consultant and a lecturer for the CIA.

Biography

Nosenko was allegedly born in Nikolaev, Ukrainian SSR (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine). His alleged father, Ivan Nosenko, was USSR Minister of Shipbuilding from 1939 until his death in 1956. During the Second World War, Nosenko allegedly attended naval preparatory school, intending on a career in shipbuilding, like his father. After the war, he allegedly attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), graduating in 1950. On graduation he allegedly served in Naval Intelligence until he allegedly transferred to the KGB in 1953. In the KGB, he allegedly worked primarily in the Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), which was responsible for counterintelligence and internal security.^[2]

Defection

The below annotated passage is taken verbatim from a declassified CIA document referencing Nosenko's defection and subsequent treatment.

Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, an officer of the KGB, defected to a representative (Tennent H. Bagley) of this Agency in Geneva, Switzerland, on 4 February 1964. The responsibility for his exploitation was assigned to the then SR [Soviet Russia] Division of the Clandestine Service and he was brought to this country on 12 February 1964. After initial interrogation by representatives of the SR Division, he was moved to a safehouse in Clinton, Maryland, from 4 April 1964 where he was confined and interrogated until 13 August 1965 when he was moved to a specially constructed "jail" in a remote wooded area at [redacted] The SR Division was convinced that he was a dispatched agent but even after a long period of hostile interrogation was unable to prove their contention and he was confined at [redacted] in an effort to convince him to "confess."

This Office [of Security], together with the Office of General Counsel became increasingly concerned with the illegality of the Agency's position in handling a defector under these conditions for such a long period of time. Strong representations were made to the Director (Mr. Helms) by this Office, the Office of General Counsel, and the Legislative Liaison Counsel, and on 27 October 1967, the responsibility for Nosenko's further handling was transferred to [possible KGB "mole" Bruce Solie in] the Office of Security under the direction of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, then Admiral Rufus Taylor.

Nosenko was moved to a comfortable safehouse in the Washington area and was interviewed under friendly, sympathetic conditions by his Security [Office] Case Officer, Mr. Solie, for more than a year. It soon became apparent that Nosenko was bona fide and he was moved to more comfortable surroundings with considerable freedom of independent movement and has continued to cooperate fully with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and this Office since that time. He has proven to be the most valuable and economical defector this Agency has ever had and leads which were ignored by the SR Division were explored and have resulted in the arrest and prosecution [redacted] He currently is living under an alias; secured a divorce from his Russian wife and remarried an American citizen. He is happy, relaxed, and appreciative of the treatment accorded him and states "while I regret my three years of incarceration, I have no bitterness and now understand how it could happen."^[3]

Note: The above official CIA account by the Office of Security differs markedly from the one given by Nosenko's case officer from mid-June 1962 to late-October 1967, Tennent H. Bagley. In his 1978 HSCA testimony,^[4] his 2007 book, "Spy Wars," and his 2014 follow-up PDF, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars",^[5] Bagley said that Nosenko, refusing to leave his beloved wife and two daughters behind in Moscow, "defected in place" to the CIA in late May, 1962, and that none of the leads Nosenko provided to the CIA were to Soviet assets who "had current access to NATO governmental secrets, [were] actively cooperating [with Soviet intelligence] at the time, and had previously been unsuspected by Western counterintelligence agencies."

In late May 1962 (according to Bagley; some say early June), Nosenko contacted the CIA in Geneva,Switzerland, about two months after he had accompanied an arms-control delegation to that city as the delegation's ostensible security officer. Nosenko met one-on-one with Bagley in a Geneva "safe house," and offered his services to the CIA in exchange for about $250 worth of Swiss francs that he had spent on "wine, women and song" and which he needed to replenish as it represented an unauthorized expenditure of KGB funds which he would soon have to account for to his superiors. He told Bagley that he was a major in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), that until recently he had been the deputy chief of the KGB department operating against the American Embassy in Moscow, and that he was now the head of the department that monitored and attempted to recruit American and British tourists in the USSR. Nosenko provided some information to Bagley that could only be known by someone connected to the KGB, and Bagley promised to give him the money he requested at the next meeting. Nosenko volunteered to Bagley that he didn't want to leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow, and that he would therefore never leave the USSR to live in the West. He promised, however, to re-contact the CIA whenever he was permitted to travel outside the USSR in the future, and warned Bagley that he didn't want to be contacted inside the USSR. As Nosenko was leaving, he mentioned that he knew how the CIA's spy, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, had been caught, but said that he didn't have enough time at the moment to tell Bagley the details and would fill him in "next time."

Nosenko, who spoke English, met one-on-one with Russian-understanding Bagley during this first meeting, and with Bagley and Russia-born George Kisevalter during the remaining four meetings. During the second one, he told Bagley and Kisevalter that Popov was caught due to superior KGB surveillance in Moscow when an American diplomat, George Winters, had been seen mailing a letter to him. Nosenko returned to Moscow with the delegation in mid-June,^[6] and Bagley and Kisevalter flew to Headquarters on separate planes—each carrying copies of the tape recordings and copies of each other's notes.

In late January 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a former Marine who had lived in the USSR for two-and-one-half years, Nosenko once again accompanied the delegation to Geneva and re-contacted Bagley and Kisevalter. He shocked Bagley and Kisevalter by telling them he had been the case officer of accused the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR. A few days later, he nervously told them he had received a telegram from Moscow ordering him to return immediately, that he took this as an indication that the Kremlin was "on to" his spying for the CIA, and that he therefore wanted to physically defect to the U.S. right away, even though it meant he'd be leaving his wife and daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves.^[7]

Regarding the recall telegram Nosenko claimed to have received from KGB headquarters, the CIA was later able to determine that no such missive had been sent, and Nosenko subsequently admitted making the story up in order to persuade the CIA to accept his request to physically defect to the U.S.

Assertions about the Kennedy assassination

Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had had nothing to do with Oswald in the USSR, and that it hadn't even interviewed the former Marine radar operator because he seemed "abnormal." After Nosenko was allowed to physically defect to the U.S., Richard Helms, realizing that Nosenko was probably a false defector, convinced Earl Warren to not allow Nosenko to testify to the Warren Commission, which at that time was investigating the assassination. Nosenko did, however, testify to the HSCA in 1978, but the members of the commission found him to be un-credible.

Concerns that Nosenko was a triple agent

By mid-1964, CIA's Soviet Bloc Division (formerly called the Soviet Russia Division) strongly suspected that Nosenko was a KGB plant for several reasons, including the fact that he had lied twice about his rank (and had even provided an official KGB document that backed up his second lie),^[8] and because Anatoliy Golitsyn's warning that the KGB would soon send someone like Nosenko to discredit him seemed to Bagley and James Angleton to have been fulfilled when the former read Golitsyn's thick file at CIA headquarters and realized that everything Nosenko had volunteered to Kisevalter and himself in Geneva a week earlier about specific Soviet penetrations of NATO countries' intelligence services had contradicted or minimized what Golitsyn had already told Angleton. This seemed especially suspicious given the fact that Golitsyn and Nosenko had been in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.

About a month after Nosenko arrived in the U.S., he was taken by Bagley on a two-week vacation to Hawaii, and when they returned to Washington, Nosenko, who had not cooperated with the CIA's interviewers up to that point, was detained in a Washington-area "safe house," administered a polygraph exam, subjected to interrogations, and from 1965 to 1967 was subjected to increasingly harsh interrogations and conditions, including being held in a purpose-built, bunker-like safe house in an operation that was approved by CIA Director John A. McCone.^[9][10]

Although Nosenko fell into a trance-like state and came close to "breaking" at one point, he never did.

The situation was made even more complex after a KGB informant to the FBI's New York City field office by the name of Aleksei Kulak (See Fedora (KGB agent) ) confirmed that Nosenko was a lieutenant-colonel, but it turned out that he was, by his own admission, only a captain.^[11] At that point, the Nosenko issue evolved into an inter-service confrontation. To the CIA's Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division, Nosenko was a false defector, but the FBI, largely on what Fedora (KGB agent) and another KGB volunteer to the FBI, Dimitry Polyakov (Top Hat) told it, accepted him as genuine. According to Bagley, Polyakov did start spying for the CIA after he'd left the U.N. in NYC and was reposted to Burma, Moscow, and India, but he was eventually caught by the KGB in Moscow and executed.) Three polygraph exams were administered to Nosenko by the CIA; two by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Block Division (in 1964 and 1966), and one by the Office of Security's Bruce Solie in 1968. The exams given in 1964 and in 1966 suggested that Nosenko was lying, and the one given in 1968 seemed to suggest he was telling the truth. All three exams were extensively analyzed by an outside polygraph expert by the name of Richard O. Arther, and he concluded in a ten-page report to the HSCA that the 1966 one was the most reliable of the three.

Some of the evidence against Nosenko was derived from the analysis of his file by an earlier KGB defector, Peter Deriabin, who had defected to the U.S. in 1954. Deriabin had worked in the same sections of the KGB where Nosenko claimed to have worked, but found the details of his stories (which changed over time) to be unconvincing. Years after the incident, Deriabin still believed Nosenko was a KGB plant.

Deriabin noticed many inconsistencies and errors in Nosenko's accounts, for example:

• Nosenko "could not describe in detail how such a [KGB file] check is done..."
• Nosenko, having ostensibly served as a security officer for delegations, "could not even explain how Soviet citizens are checked... before going abroad."
• Nosenko "knew so little about day-to-day procedures... that one can only conclude that he had never been a KGB officer, at least not in Moscow..."

When the interrogations by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Block Division were unable to "break" Nosenko over a period of three years, his case was turned over to Bruce Solie of the Office of Security, who managed to effectively clear Nosenko, get him released from confinement, get him reimbursed for his troubles, and eventually get him hired by the Agency to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.

The question of whether or not Nosenko was a KGB plant is still controversial, with many believing that he was a misunderstood true defector, and many others believing he was originally dispatched to the CIA in mid-June 1962 to protect a KGB mole in the agency threatened by true-defector Anatoliy Golitsyn's revelations, and that he physically defected to the U.S. seventeen months later because the KGB believed the CIA trusted him, and therefore sent him to the U.S. to give testimony to the Warren Commission to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy who had lived in the Soviet Union for two-and-a-half years, wasn't a KGB agent.

Nosenko claimed to have been tortured and even given LSD during his incarceration by the CIA, saying "it almost killed me". These allegations were denied by Bagley and by Richard Helms, Director of the CIA during the most intense part of Nosenko's interrogations.

Regarding Anatoliy Golitsyn, his defection led the KGB to order fifty-four Rezidentura to temporarily suspend all meetings with important agents.^[12] The KGB also made significant efforts to discredit Golitsyn by promoting disinformation that he was involved in illegal smuggling operations.^[12] After five years, in 1967, the KGB assassination and sabotage section under Viktor Vladimirov finally discovered Golitsyn's CIA hideout in Canada and attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate him.

Tennent H. Bagley was Nosenko's case officer from late May (some say early June) of 1962 until Bagley was routinely reposted in late 1967 to Brussels, Belgium as Chief of Station there. Bagley, subsequently Deputy Chief of the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division and Chief of the SBD's Counterintelligence section, wrote a book that was largely about the Nosenko case.^[13] In 2013, Bagley wrote another book which revealed details he had acquired by comparing notes with KGB's First Chief Directorate's head of disinformation operations, Sergey Kondrashev.^[14] Ever since Bagley read Golitsyn's file at CIA headquarters in mid-June, 1962, he suspected that Nosenko was a false defector, and was glad to have his suspicions confirmed by Kondrashev.

The Incriminating "Zepp" Incident

In April 1961, GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky was recruited by the CIA and MI6 in London. Two weeks later, Penkovsky and his Moscow-based MI6 contact, Greville Wynne, were secretly recorded by the KGB as they were having a meal in a Moscow restaurant. During the meal, one of them asked the other about "Zeph," a bargirl whose name was Stephanie and with whom Penkovsky had become smitten while he was in London.

In June 1962, Nosenko asked his CIA case officers, Tennent H. Bagley and George Kisevalter, "out of the blue" about "Zepp," saying that high-tech KGB surveillance had overheard the U.S. Assistant Naval Attache (Leo J. Dulacki) and his Indonesian counterpart talking about this mysterious person.

The fact that the KGB had confused Stephanie's nickname, "Zeph," for the name "Zepp" only became apparent to Wynne a couple of years later when he, imprisoned in Moscow for the Penkovsky affair, was played the tape recording of his and Penkovsky's Moscow restaurant conversation, and was asked by his interrogator, "Who is Zepp?"—which anecdote Wynne relayed to his MI6 de-briefers after he was released by the Soviets. All of which suggested to Bagley, as he relayed in his book "Spy Wars," that the KGB had become aware of Penkovsky's treason within a couple of weeks of his recruitment by the CIA and MI6, and the reason he wasn't arrested until sixteen months later was due to the fact that he had been betrayed by a high-level KGB "mole" in American or British intelligence whom the KGB knew would be uncovered easily if he were arrested too soon. It also suggested to Bagley that it had taken the Soviets sixteen months to set up a false scenario in which to safely arrest Penkovsky.

Aftermath

On March 1, 1969, Nosenko was formally acknowledged as a genuine defector, and released, with $80,000 worth of financial compensation from the CIA.^[8] He was also provided with a new identity to live out his life in the South of the US.^[8]

The harsh interrogations and Spartan living conditions he had experienced as part of his three-year detention by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division were two of the "abuses" documented in the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents in 1973.^[15] In an internal note at the CIA in 1978, then DCI Stansfield Turner, referring to Nosenko's solitary confinement, stated:

The excessively harsh treatment of Mr. Nosenko went beyond the bounds of propriety or good judgment. At my request, Mr. Hart has discussed this case with many senior officers to make certain that its history will not again be repeated. The other main lesson to be learned is that although counterintelligence analysis necessarily involves the making of hypotheses, we must at all times treat them as what they are, and not act on them until they have been objectively tested in an impartial manner.^{[citation needed]}

On 16 November 1978, Bagley was permitted by the HSCA to testify (and to recite a 23-page letter he had written to G. Robert Blakey on 11 October) in rebuttal to what above-mentioned CIA officer John L. Hart told it on September 15, 1978 ^[16][17] about Bagley's alleged mistreatment of, and unjustified "bias" against, Nosenko.

The case has been examined in several books, and the 1986 movie Yuri Nosenko: Double Agent starring Tommy Lee Jones. The movie depicted the intense debate over whether Nosenko was true defector.

Although Nosenko did help narrow down the search for a KGB "mole" in the British Admiralty, John Vassall, after Golitsyn had pointed British Intelligence in the right direction, Bagley points out in "Spy Wars" and his PDF follow-up "Ghosts of the Spy Wars" that Nosenko didn't uncover anyone who wasn't already suspected, or who hadn't already lost access to classified information.

By March 1976, Nosenko's CIA cryptonym was PDDONOR,^[18] and he had already changed his name to George Martin Rosnek.^[19] He died on 23 August 2008.

17 audio files of interviews of Nosenko during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination were made public by the National Archives on July 24, 2017.^[20]

The Differing Accounts of Bagley and Kisevalter Regarding Nosenko

In his authorized biography of George Kisevalter, author Clarence Ashley has Kisevalter disagreeing with Bagley (who isn't mentioned by name in the book but referred to several times as "the other case officer" or "the original case officer") on several points regarding the Nosenko case. The most important of which was Nosenko's contradicting Bagley in 1964 as to whether or not Nosenko had said in 1962 that his underlings in the American Embassy section had seen the embassy's security officer, John Abidian, "setting up" Oleg Penkovsky's "dead drop" in Moscow in late December 1960. Bagley was adamant that Nosenko hadn't said this in 1962, but had instead said that his (Nosenko's) section had monitored Abidian, and "all we found was a pair of girl's panties in his bedroom." Nosenko was originally insistent that he had said that in 1962 (i.e., that Abidian had been spotted "setting up" the dead drop in 1960) -- and Kisevalter agreed with him.^[21][22] The issue had an important bearing on Nosenko's "bona fides," given the fact that Abidian didn't check on the dead drop until late December 1961, and given the fact that Nosenko had told Bagley and Kisevalter in 1962 that he had transferred out of the American Embassy section of the KGB at the end of 1961, which, if true, meant that he no longer would have been privy to the ostensible dead-drop monitoring reports that would have come into Nosenko's office after that, which reports Nosenko claimed in 1964 to have read. This perplexing contradiction is written about by authors Jeremy Duns and David Wise in their respective books, "Dead Drop" and "Mole Hunt".^[23][24][25] Bagley took this discrepancy as one of several indications that Popov hadn't been caught due to KGB surveillance, after all, but betrayed by a "mole" in the CIA.

Another thing Bagley and Kisevalter disagreed about was whether or not Nosenko was "always drunk," as Kisevalter and Nosenko claimed, during his meetings with them in 1962. Bagley admitted that Nosenko did drink a lot in the safe house, but said that he never appeared to be inebriated, whereas Kisevalter agreed with Nosenko's claim that he (Nosenko), having allegedly stopped at several bars on his way to the safe house as part of his "anti-KGB-surveillance routine," had always arrived at the meetings "snockered" and continued drinking heavily at the safe house.

Kisevalter explained the large number of apparent contradictions and misstatements in Nosenko's statements during the meetings (as reflected in the tape recordings, Bagley's and Kisevalter's notes, and Kisevalter's "transcriptions" of the tape recordings made directly from Bagley's notes instead of from the tapes, themselves) as having been caused by Nosenko's alleged drunkenness, the alleged language difficulties between Bagley and Nosenko, Bagley's allegedly "mistake-filled" notes, and the allegedly poor quality of the tape recordings that had been made during the meetings.

Bagley points out in his book, "Spy Wars," that Nosenko never appeared to be drunk, that he (Nosenko) could speak English well enough and Bagley could understand Russian well enough for them to be able to communicate satisfactorily during their one-on-one meeting (the first one), and that both he and Kisevalter had taken notes during the four meeting they had had together with Nosenko. Bagley also points out that Abidian didn't set up Penkovsky's dead drop -- Penkovsky himself had set it up before he was recruited by the CIA and MI6 in April 1961 -- and that Abidian only checked it in late December 1961 because the CIA mistakenly believed Penkovsky had signaled it to do so in a mysterious, somewhat-conforming-to-the-agreed-upon-format Christmas Eve phone call to the residence of an American Embassy employee.