In 1964, Yuri Nosenko came over to the West to deliver the message that the KGB had nothing to do with the JFK assassination; but his CIA handler, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, concludes in his new book that Nosenko was an agent of deception sent to discredit previous bona fide defectors.
The Diane Rehm radio program is like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, but not because her voice shakes and quivers due to an illness. It's her pseudo-Left party line couched in phrases better saved for psychotherapy that send you out for ear muffs. Taking on a kindergarten teacher empathy, she oozes catharsis with her National Socialist Radio callers, voicing deep concern that America actually deploys its armed forces, or can’t provide everyone with health insurance, or is polluting the world with capitalist effluents, or that George Bush hasn’t abdicated despite all of them collectively holding their breath until they turned blue.
Her morning group therapy for the politically impaired is worth ignoring, unless she happens onto a subject beyond the usual gooey platitudes, which she did recently to discuss the latest conspiracy theories surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination. In this instance she called on her irregular sit-in, a nice-sounding girl from USA Today with a pleasing voice, but few brain cells she can call her own.
Keying on papers discovered in the Dallas prosecutor’s office hidden since the assassination, three guests gurgled on, either agreeing with each other or not, based on the subjects of their books – confusing the issue of a conspiracy even more. This fractured environment was exacerbated by callers to the program — obviously not screened properly –- who trotted out their very own pet theory, usually totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
I emailed the program to let them know there is a real mystery about the assassination right under their noses: the re-emergence of the controversy at CIA about the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko in 1964. Nosenko came over to the West to deliver the message that the KGB had nothing to do with the JFK assassination –- nor did they have contact with Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived in the USSR for three years before returning to the US just before the events in Dallas.
Tennent “Pete” Bagley, the CIA officer who handled the Nosenko defection, is coming to the Raleigh Spy Conference March 26-28 2008 to discuss his new book on the story – Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games – after his colleagues at CIA abruptly canceled his scheduled talk at Langley last summer. Why would CIA insult a former high-ranking officer and deny him the routine opportunity offered to other former officers to discuss their books? And what about Nosenko’s message about JFK and Oswald?
After Nosenko came over to our side, Bagley – and the chief of counterintelligence for CIA, the famous James Angleton – had trouble believing Nosenko’s bona fides beyond their confusion about his message concerning JFK and Oswald. For example, Nosenko told Bagley he was a KGB colonel when he was actually a captain. He could not keep his former schedule straight, could not verify where he was on certain dates and claimed to know people he could not have met. Bagley moved to another assignment without clearing Nosenko, turning him over to the security section of CIA who imprisoned the defector in a compound in Virginia where he was kept isolated in a specially built concrete cell and deprived of every day conveniences while undergoing unrelenting interrogation.
Nosenko still could not keep his stories straight, but he never broke down and admitted he was lying. After three years he was released and discovered that he was now acknowledged as a hero by new management at CIA under DCI William Colby. With Angleton gone from the Agency, the new regime saw Nosenko as a victim of the paranoia he created in his obsessive search for an as yet unidentified “mole” at CIA named Sasha. Nosenko was welcomed with open arms, given a cash settlement and a job lecturing at CIA. And there the story ended – until spring 2007 and the publication of Pete Bagley’s book.
Retired in Brussels since the mid-70s, Bagley has had time to think again about Nosenko, especially since he was humiliated by a congressional inquiry into the affair that attempted to blame him for Nosenko’s imprisonment. And since the early 90s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bagley has been able to speak with former KGB officers about the Nosenko affair. His conclusion is that Nosenko was indeed an agent of deception sent to discredit previous bona fide defectors, and to distance the USSR from the JFK assassination.
But questions remain. What made the Soviets feel so strongly they were suspected in the West of involvement in the assassination? And why make a big show about not contacting Oswald in the USSR?
Which brings us to another new book, Programmed to Kill by Ion Pacepa, former chief of the Romanian secret police under communism who defected to the US in 1978. Pacepa maintains that Oswald indeed was an agent recruited by the Soviets and trained to be sent on a mission to kill JFK. He draws on his own tradecraft and that of the KGB to explain Oswald’s activities and makes a convincing case. He demonstrates that Soviet leader Khrushchev had indeed ordered assassinations around the world, and that Kennedy was on the list as the Cold War got hot in the early 60s over Berlin and Cuba.
But Pacepa says the mission to kill Kennedy was called off when revelations leaked to the Western press about Kremlin “wet jobs” — but Oswald continued anyway, causing the Soviets to implement the deception plan in place before it was scuttled. The Pacepa theory does straighten the dozens of cul-de-sacs in the assassination, most prominently his visits to the Mexico City where Soviet operatives often visited to communicate with home base.
Yet, Pete Bagley will have none of Pacepa. And once again there is more disagreement over whether or not Oswald was an agent of some type, or whether or not he acted alone.
But the Nosenko case and the Pacepa theory are much stronger than the disconnected ignorance aired on the Diane Rehm program on the JFK killing. And Bagley’s story about Nosenko will cause a sensation at the Raleigh Spy Conference where he will be joined by the chief historian for CIA on Angleton; former counterintelligence operative Brian Kelley – the wrong man in the Robert Hanssen case who will unravel a true tale of a famous double agent for the first time in public; Jerry Schecter, former Time magazine bureau chief during the Cold War; and Washington Post editorial writer and former Moscow bureau chief David Ignatius, also the author of espionage fiction admired by the intelligence community. Special guest Stanton Evans will also appear at the conference to discuss his new book Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies.
reevesmedia@ncrrbiz.com
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