Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  That was a harsh judgment to render against someone who had helped the CIA uncover two major KGB penetrations. Nosenko had warned that the KGB had blackmailed a homosexual in the British naval attaché’s office, a tip that led directly to the arrest and conviction of William John Vassall, and he had revealed that small, pencillike listening devices were imbedded in the wall behind each radiator at the American Embassy in Moscow. They had been placed behind the radiators, he explained, so that the tiny pinholes that channeled the sound to the bugs would not be painted over. In the world of counterintelligence, however, it was easy enough to pass these two leads off as “giveaways,” penetrations that the Soviets assumed to be blown already and that could be given up to establish an agent’s bona fides without damage to ongoing operations. According to Bagley, both Vassall and the bugging operation had been compromised prior to the appearance of Nosenko. In fact, they had been compromised by Golitsin—two more instances of the uncanny overlap of information provided by Russian intelligence officers who had ostensibly served in entirely different branches of the KGB. Although Golitsin had not known Vassall’s name, he had revealed enough to make his uncovering “inevitable,” Bagley maintained, a fact that the KGB recognized by severing its contacts with Vassall immediately after Golitsin’s defection. Nosenko’s information merely “permitted [Vassall] to be caught sooner, and that is all,” Bagley said. As for the bugs in the embassy, Golitsin “had given approximate locations of some of the microphones six months earlier…. The actual tearing out of the walls … would have been done, and the microphone system found, without Nosenko’s information.”

  Nosenko arrived in Geneva as expected on January 20, 1964, along with the rest of the Soviet delegation. After checking into his hotel, he went to a pay phone, dialed the telegraph office, and dictated a brief, innocuous message. Within hours Bagley and Kisvalter were on a plane to Switzerland. Three days later they were sitting in a CIA safe house in the suburbs of Geneva listening to Nosenko’s assurances that the KGB had never had anything to do with Lee Harvey Oswald and most especially had not recruited him to kill Kennedy. Nosenko said he had personally examined the case when Oswald defected to Moscow in October of 1959, and had determined that he was too unstable to be taken on as an agent. The KGB had not even wanted to accept Oswald as a defector, Nosenko said, but had relented when he attempted suicide. As for Oswald’s wife, Marina, Nosenko said that she was stupid, uneducated, and possessed “anti-Soviet characteristics.” When she and Oswald asked to leave the Soviet Union for the United States, the KGB was perfectly content to see them go. Summarizing Nosenko’s first session with Bagley and Kisvalter, Angleton wrote that “the thrust of Source’s account was that neither Oswald nor his wife had at any time been of any interest whatsoever to Soviet authorities, that there had not ever been thought given to recruiting either of them as agents and that, in fact, the Soviets were glad to get rid of them both.”

  One week later Nosenko slipped away for another session with Bagley and Kisvalter. “No matter how I may hate anyone,” he said, “I cannot speak against my convictions and since I know this case I could unhesitatingly sign off to the fact that the Soviet Union cannot be tied into this in any way.” Nosenko said that within hours of Kennedy’s assassination he had been called in to examine Oswald’s file and assess the KGB’s liability in the President’s death. Nosenko insisted that the only KGB involvement had been to ask Marina’s uncle, a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), to persuade Oswald not to spread anti-Soviet propaganda upon his return to the United States. Nosenko also claimed to know all about the visit Oswald paid to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City in quest of a visa to return to the Soviet Union. The embassy cabled Moscow for instructions, Nosenko related, “and we said absolutely not because he is completely undesirable—there was no interest in him whatsoever.”

  Quite apart from the preexisting suspicion that he was under KGB control, Nosenko’s story defied belief. Such categorical assurances of Russian innocence, coming so soon after the assassination, seemed too convenient for comfort. As Bagley put it, the CIA was “unbelievably lucky” to have found such a source. “Of the many thousands of KGB people throughout the world, CIA had secret relations with only one, and this one turned out to have participated directly in the Oswald case. Not only once, but on two separate occasions: when Oswald came to Russia in 1959 and again after the assassination when the Kremlin leadership caused a definitive review of the whole KGB file on Oswald.”

  Nosenko’s contention that the KGB had not even bothered to debrief Oswald, an ex-Marine who had been stationed at a U-2 base in Japan, flew in the face of everything that was known about the KGB’s handling of defectors. “Here was a young American,” Bagley said, “just out of the Marine Corps, already inside the USSR and going to great lengths to stay there and become a citizen. The KGB never bothered to talk to him, not even once…. Can this be true? Could we all be wrong in what we’ve heard about rigid Soviet security precautions and about their strict procedures and disciplines…? Of course not.” Helms stated flatly that “no person familiar with the facts … finds Nosenko’s statements about Lee Harvey Oswald and the KGB to be credible.”

  Nosenko told Bagley and Kisvalter that he wanted to defect, a sharp reversal from eighteen months before when he had said he could never abandon his family in Moscow. Bagley, by his own account, was “stupefied.” “Why?” he asked Nosenko. “Didn’t you tell us you never would?”

  “Well, I think they may suspect me,” Nosenko replied vaguely. “I have decided to make a new life.”

  “How about your family?” Bagley asked. Nosenko said they would be all right.

  Ordinarily, a suspected disinformation agent would not be accepted as a defector, but this was an extraordinary case. True or false, Nosenko was crucial to the Warren Commission’s investigation. As Richard Helms later explained it, “If his information were to be believed, then we could conclude that the KGB and the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 and therefore had nothing to do with President Kennedy’s murder…. If Mr. Nosenko was giving us false information about Oswald’s contacts with the KGB in 1959 to 1962, it was fair for us to surmise that there may have been an Oswald-KGB connection in November, 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy.”

  Either way, Nosenko was the best witness the CIA was likely to find. “You couldn’t possibly turn this one down,” a CIA officer said. “It was decided that although the Agency was intensely suspicious of him—perhaps more than suspicious, they had concluded that he was being dispatched to mislead the U.S. government— nevertheless we must not tip our hand,” John Hart, an expert on the Nosenko case, explained. “We must not let Nosenko know that we suspected him, because Nosenko would then report back to his superiors that we knew what they were up to. Thus Nosenko was treated with a maximum of duplicity.”

  “The only thing I want to know, and I ask this question, what should I expect in the future?” Nosenko inquired of Bagley in his broken English.

  “The following awaits,” Bagley replied. “As I presented it, you wanted to come to the United States to have some job, some chance for future life which gives you security, and if possible, the opportunity to work in this field which you know. Is that correct?”

  “Absolutely,” Nosenko responded.

  “The Director has said yes, flatly, absolutely yes. In fact, I would say enthusiastic. That is the only way to describe it,” Bagley assured him. “We talked about the means by which you can have a solid career with a certain personal independence. Because of the very great assistance you have been to us already and because of this desire to give you a backing, they will give you a little additional personal security. We want to give you an account of your own, a sum at the beginning of just plain $50,000, and from there on, as a working contract, $25,000 a year. But, in addition, because of [the Vassall] case, which would have been impossible without your information,
we are going to add at least $10,000 to this initial sum.”

  Nosenko warned Bagley that they would have to move quickly. He feared that his superiors were on to him. He had just received a telegram recalling him to Moscow on the next day, February 4. On that day Nosenko once again slipped away from the rest of the Soviet delegation and, dressed as an American Army officer, was driven across the German border to a CIA safe house near Frankfurt. Three days later David Murphy, chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, arrived in Frankfurt and repeated to Nosenko the promises Bagley had made in Geneva. “First, I assured Subject that I was satisfied that he was genuine,” Murphy recorded. “Based on this and assuming his continued ‘cooperation,’ I said we would proceed to make arrangements to bring him to the States. Second, I confirmed our agreement to pay him $25,000 for each year in place [$50,000 to cover the period since Nosenko’s initial contact in June of 1962] plus $10,000 for [the Vassall case] and our readiness to contract for his services at $25,000 per year. Third, I explained the polygraph he would be expected to take as final proof of his bona fides.”

  In fact, Murphy was certain Nosenko was lying, at least about Oswald. “I did not believe that it would be possible for the Soviet intelligence services to have remained indifferent to the arrival in 1959 in Moscow of a former Marine radar operator who had served at what was an active U-2 operational base.” It was possible that the Soviets had not made the connection between Oswald’s assignment and the U-2, but that would not deter them from debriefing him. If nothing else, “they will talk to a Marine about close order drill,” Murphy said. Upon his return to Washington, Murphy drafted a memo that revealed his true opinion of Nosenko, namely, “that Subject is here on a KGB-directed mission,” and urged that “Subject must be broken at some point if we are to learn something of the full scope of the KGB plan.”

  Nosenko arrived in the United States on February 11. Afraid— with good reason—that the CIA’s promises would evaporate, he drowned his anxieties in drink. “He got to the point where he was starting out the day with a drink and was continuing to drink more or less continually throughout the twenty-four hours,” Hart said. “He didn’t want to do anything except drink and carouse,” Helms recalled, adding that one binge ended with “an incident in Baltimore where he started punching up a bar.”

  Had he known what Golitsin was saying about him, Nosenko might have taken to drink with an even greater vengeance. Consulted about Nosenko’s bona fides, Golitsin “felt in general that there are indeed serious signs of disinformation in this affair,” a CIA memo reported. “The purpose of Nosenko’s coming out, he thought, would be to contradict what [Golitsin] had said, and also possibly to set [Golitsin] up for kidnapping, also to divert our attention from investigations of [Golitsin’s] leads by throwing up false scents, and to protect remaining Soviet sources.”

  A case in point was the still unsolved mystery of V. M. Kovshuk’s mission to the United States. At his first meetings with Bagley and Kisvalter in 1962, Nosenko said that Kovshuk had come to meet with an American serviceman whose Soviet code name was ANDREY. After his defection Nosenko provided additional clues to ANDREY’s identity. He had been recruited during the early 1950s while serving as a mechanic in the motor pool at the American Embassy in Moscow, Nosenko said. That quickly led the FBI to an Army sergeant who admitted meeting with the Soviets in Moscow and even with Kovshuk in the United States. But an Army mechanic would have no information of any conceivable intelligence value to the Russians. An official as important as Golitsin said Kovshuk was would not have come all the way to the United States just to meet with ANDREY. Golitsin insisted that Kovshuk had come to meet with a much more important source, perhaps the KGB’s mole inside the CIA, and that Nosenko’s story about the meeting with ANDREY was merely a cover for Kovshuk’s real mission.

  A similar pattern existed in the case of SASHA, the KGB spy who Golitsin said had penetrated the CIA’s operations in Germany. Although a number of suspects had been investigated, the CIA had made no progress in identifying SASHA until Golitsin dredged up from his memory some additional leads to specific operations SASHA had blown in Berlin. Combing the files of the Berlin Operations Base, investigators came upon “a whole series of operational disasters.” The common denominator in all of the failed operations was a CIA contract agent named Igor Orlov, “barely over five feet tall, a little china doll of a man,” who had served valiantly as a Russian agent behind the German lines in World War II and had defected to the West after the fighting stopped. Throughout most of the 1950s Orlov had been a “principal agent” of Bill Harvey in Berlin. As a native Russian, he had been the perfect vehicle for maintaining contact between the American CIA officers and their agents in the Soviet sector of Berlin. If he were working for the Russians, however, Orlov would have been the perfect vehicle for blowing the cover of each and every CIA agent he dealt with. One of his handlers estimated that Orlov could have blown as many as twenty CIA agents.

  Nosenko’s already suspect credibility was badly damaged by the SASHA case. Although Orlov denied the charge, Golitsin had been proved right, and Nosenko wrong. Nosenko had intimated to his interrogators that SASHA was an Army officer, an inaccurate lead that momentarily sidetracked the CIA’s investigation just as it was closing in on Orlov. Here was one more instance to support their thesis that Nosenko had been sent to undermine Golitsin’s information. There was still another case in which Nosenko’s version of events seemed designed to assure the CIA that, regardless of what Golitsin said, it had not been penetrated by the KGB.

  Nosenko said that in November of 1963 he had traveled to Gorki, a major industrial city on the Volga River, as part of a nationwide manhunt for a traitor, one Cherapanov, a former KGB officer who had passed a packet of classified documents to the American Embassy in Moscow. Cherapanov was well known to the CIA, since several years before he had made an unsuccessful attempt to defect to the Americans in Yugoslavia. According to Nosenko, Cherapanov had lost his job with the KGB as a result of his abortive defection and had been exiled to a functionary’s position in a state-run publishing enterprise. Cherapanov was serving as a guide for an Indiana bookseller and his wife, who were touring the Soviet Union, when he handed them a package wrapped in old copies of Pravda and Izvestia and asked them to deliver it to the American Embassy. The Indiana couple did as Cherapanov asked, handing the bundle to the political counselor, Malcolm Toon, who immediately concluded that this was a setup. Two weeks earlier in Warsaw, an American Army attaché had been declared persona non grata for accepting a map of rocket sites thrust upon him by a Polish intelligence officer in a deliberate provocation. Members of the CIA station in Moscow argued with Toon that the Cherapanov case was different, that the documents, which among other things contained detailed KGB surveillance reports, were too damaging to be an intentional plant. Toon refused to reconsider, and the documents were returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to Nosenko’s version, Soviet security agents immediately identified Cherapanov as the source of the documents, and after a brief chase he was apprehended and shot.

  By Nosenko’s account, Toon had made a rash decision that cost Cherapanov his life, but a counterintelligence analysis suggested that perhaps Toon had done the right thing for the wrong reason. Once Cherapanov had tried to defect in Yugoslavia, the KGB would never have allowed him to come in contact with United States citizens again except for some deliberate purpose. Furthermore, the documents Cherapanov had handed to the Indiana bookseller fairly reeked of disinformation. Before returning them to the Soviets as Toon had ordered, the CIA took the precaution of photographing the documents for further study, and one of them, a detailed KGB analysis of the movements of FBI surveillance teams in New York City, provided new evidence in the Popov case. The KGB analysis showed that the FBI was concentrating on a special surveillance at precisely the time that Popov’s agent Tairova had arrived in New York. If it was genuine, the document lent considerable weight to the thesis that the FBI’s indiscreet handlin
g of the case had led to Popov’s downfall. By relating the details of the KGB’s pursuit of Cherapanov, Nosenko seemed to be vouching for the authenticity of a document that said in effect that Popov had not been blown by George Blake in 1955 but had remained a trustworthy CIA agent until the Tairova case in 1959. From the Soviet point of view, the Cherapanov document served the dual purpose of further confusing the question of Popov’s bona fides and of sowing a few seeds of discord between the CIA and FBI.

  Suspicions of Nosenko’s story were heightened by the fact that it contained a deliberate and demonstrable falsehood. At the time of his defection in 1964, Nosenko claimed that he was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB and offered as proof of his rank a travel document that he said had been issued to him for his trip to Gorki during the hunt for Cherapanov. The document listed his rank as lieutenant colonel, but under questioning Nosenko admitted that he was merely a captain in the KGB. It was not surprising that Nosenko would inflate his rank in order to convince the CIA of his importance, but the fact that the inflated rank was confirmed by the KGB travel document suggested that Nosenko had had help in concocting his ruse.