Bill Gertz on Yuri Nosenko

[Sean Osborne]

http://www.gertzfile.com/gertzfile/InsidetheRing.html

Defector wars

The decades-long debate at the CIA over whether Soviet KGB defector Yuri Nosenko was a true defector or a plant dispatched by Moscow to fool the agency resurfaced this week.


The agency abruptly canceled a planned talk by former CIA Soviet operations officer Tennent H. "Pete" Bagley on his new book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games," a hike through the so-called wilderness of mirrors that is central to the spy business.

Intelligence sources said a network of current and former CIA officers opposed to Mr. Bagley's views was behind the cancellation.

Mr. Bagley also had his scheduled talk at the International Spy Museum canceled this week. It was expected to have been a contentious debate on Mr. Nosenko, who defected in 1964, was imprisoned by the CIA as a suspected false defector, and was eventually freed and declared legitimate in 1969. He now lives under an assumed name in Northern Virginia.

Mr. Bagley said in an interview that he believes his talk at the CIA was canceled because agency officials objected to his views on Mr. Nosenko. "It's the Nosenko case," he said. "I give very powerful, convincing reasons to believe that Nosenko was a plant."

The suspicions were confirmed by post-Cold War discussions with former KGB officers, he said.

"My book does not question whether or not Nosenko was a genuine defector," he said. "The point is that there were penetrations [of U.S. intelligence and CIA], including the breaking of American ciphers."

A CIA spokesman said Mr. Bagley's talk was not canceled due to his message but because of questions regarding prepublication review of the book.

"Intelligence officers are routinely exposed to a range of views on complex topics -- that's a key part of the job," the spokesman said.

One source of opposition to Mr. Bagley and his book is former FBI counterspy David Major, who recently called the book "dangerous and disruptive" because it presents the "myth" that the KGB would dispatch an agent as a false defector to spread disinformation.

Retired Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who works with Mr. Major at the Counterintelligence Centre also dismissed Mr. Bagley's book as "absurd" and "misleading."

Meanwhile, a senior counterintelligence official said Mr. Bagley's book is an excellent primer on the topic of spies.

Mr. Nosenko's bona fides were doubted after an earlier KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, convinced the late CIA master counterspy James Jesus Angleton that the KGB had formed an ultra-secret strategic disinformation program to deceive the United States, which included dispatching false defectors.

Mr. Bagley said he believes Mr. Nosenko was sent to cover up Russian intelligence penetrations of U.S. electronic spying and codes, and to dissuade the CIA that Moscow had no role in the assassination of President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, had defected to the Soviet Union before returning and killing Kennedy.