Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  More suspicious still, Nosenko’s bogus rank was backed up by a second Soviet source—SCOTCH, the KGB officer at the United Nations who had volunteered his services to the Americans around the time of Golitsin’s defection. SCOTCH also confirmed the story Nosenko had told Bagley and Kisvalter just before his defection in Geneva about receiving a telegram recalling him to Moscow at once. But an analysis by the National Security Agency of the radio traffic between Moscow and Geneva found no indication that such a message had been sent. Like the inflated rank, the recall telegram was an understandable lie told by a would-be defector eager to convince his handlers of the importance and urgency of his case. But the fact that SCOTCH should vouch for the lie was not understandable unless the KGB was purposely channeling disinformation to the CIA in an effort to build up Nosenko’s story. Again, Golitsin’s warnings seemed the only believable explanation. He had said that the KGB would send false agents to discredit him, and now both SCOTCH and Nosenko appeared to be playing that very game.

  On April 2,1964, Helms, accompanied by Murphy and Lawrence Houston, the Agency’s general counsel, met with Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to determine Nosenko’s legal status. According to a memo written by Houston, Katzenbach said that Nosenko was technically on parole to the CIA until the question of his bona fides could be settled and that the Agency was free “to take any action necessary to carry out the terms of the parole.” Until now, Nosenko had been treated like any other defector. His interrogators had behaved cordially toward him and had not confronted him with any of the contradictions in his story. Under these laissez-faire conditions, it was impossible to pin him down. He was drunk much of the time, and when sober, “he deflected questions, changed the subject, and invented excuses not to talk, even about isolated points of detail,” Bagley said. “It became clear that if he were to be questioned at all, some discipline had to be applied.” Given the implications Nosenko’s bona fides held for Soviet involvement in Kennedy’s death and for KGB penetration of the CIA, “it was our duty to clarify this matter,” Bagley said. “Anything less would have been … dereliction of duty.”

  On April 4, two months to the day after his defection, Nosenko was given his first lie-detector test—“fluttered,” in Agency parlance. In an effort to trick him into abandoning his charade, Nosenko was to be told that he had failed the test regardless of the outcome. The polygraph did in fact detect “significant reactions” indicating that Nosenko was lying, although the validity of the test was undermined by the intimidation tactics that preceded it. “An artifact which was described to him as an electroencephalograph was attached to him and he was told that in addition to all the other sensors, we were going to read his brain waves,” Hart recounted. “Now there was no purpose for this except—as the documentary evidence shows—except to raise his tension. He was made to fear this polygraph in every way he could.” It was impossible to tell whether the “significant reactions” were measures of Nosenko’s fear or his prevarication.

  In a deposition given to a congressional committee years later, Nosenko described what happened after he was fluttered. “An officer of CIA … started to shout that I was a phony and immediately several guards entered the room. The guards ordered me to stand by the wall, to undress, and checked me. After that I was taken upstairs in an attic room. The room had a metal bed attached to the floor in the center of this room. Nobody told me anything— how long I would be there or what would happen to me. After several days, two officers of CIA … started interrogations. I tried to cooperate and even in evening hours was writing for them whatever I could recollect about the KGB. These officers were interrogating me about a month or two months. The tone of interrogations was hostile. Then they stopped to come to see me until the end of 1964. I was kept in this room till the end of 1964 and beginning of 1965.” Nosenko was forced to rise every morning at six A.M. and was not permitted to lie down again until ten P.M. “The conditions were very poor and difficult. I could have a shower once in a week and once in a week I could shave. I was not given a toothbrush and toothpaste and food given to me was very poor. I did not have enough to eat and was hungry all the time. I had no contact with anybody to talk. I could not read. I could not smoke, and I even could not have fresh air to see anything from this room. The only window was screened and boarded. The only door of the room had a metal screen and outside in a corridor two guards were watching me day and night. The only furniture in the room was a single bed and a light bulb. The room was very, very hot in summertime.”

  According to Hart, “the guards at the house were given instructions that there must be no physical mistreatment of him but that they were not to talk to him, they were not to smile at him.” The guards passed the time by watching television, but they wore earphones so that Nosenko could not hear the sound. A CIA memo explained the purpose of Nosenko’s solitary confinement. “The interval in isolation will be extremely valuable in terms of allowing subject to ponder on the complete failure of his recent gambits.” Besides, now that Nosenko realized that the CIA did not believe him, he had to be kept confined for fear that he would redefect to the Soviet Union before the true dimensions of the KGB’s disinformation plot could be uncovered.

  Hostile interrogation had only deepened the CIA’s suspicions of Nosenko. “Before, we suspected Nosenko might be a plant,” Bagley said. “Afterwards we had come to think moreover that he might never have been a true KGB officer and that he surely had not held certain of the positions in the KGB which he claimed.” Under questioning, “Nosenko was unable to clarify any single point of doubt. Brought up against his own contradictions and other independent information, he admitted that there could be no innocent explanation … or he would remain silent, or he would come up with a new story, only to change that, too.” The contradictions could not be explained away by mere loss of memory. As Bagley pointed out, Nosenko “was supposedly talking of things he’d lived through—the KGB files he’d seen, the officers he’d worked with. If these were real experiences, he need only recall them and his reports would, all of themselves, come out the same way each time.” Nosenko admitted that he “looked bad,” even to himself.

  Helms met privately with Chief Justice Earl Warren to inform him of the CIA’s doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides. Other members of the Warren Commission and its staff were told flatly that “Nosenko is a KGB plant.” The problem was that no one in the CIA was willing to take the next step and declare that Nosenko had been sent to cover up KGB complicity in Kennedy’s murder. That step could be taken only if the CIA could “break Nosenko and get the full story of how and why he was told to tell the story he did about Oswald.” There was, the CIA conceded, “no certainty that we can ever do this.” Moreover, even if Nosenko could be definitively exposed as a liar, it did not necessarily follow that Oswald had been ordered by the KGB to kill Kennedy. Bagley speculated that Oswald might have been carried on the KGB’s rolls as a sleeper agent to be activated for sabotage in time of war. After all, Bagley pointed out, the KGB could not have expected too much from an agent whose cover was so thin as to permit a Soviet wife. Under such circumstances, Bagley said, “they would be absolutely shocked to hear their man had taken it upon himself to kill the American President.”

  For the moment, therefore, Nosenko’s testimony would have to be discounted entirely and all references to him excised from the commission’s final report so that his interrogation could proceed in secret. The commission was left with little more to go on than Oswald’s diary of his stay in Russia and the few official documents provided by the Kremlin. Neither, of course, gave any hint of Soviet complicity in the President’s death. When the commission issued its final report on September 28, 1964, it was no closer to resolving the doubts about Soviet involvement than it had been ten months before, and the CIA was no closer to solving the Nosenko riddle than on the day in June of 1962 when he had first made contact.

  The conviction of Helms, Murphy, Bagley, and, of course, Angleton that Nosenko had
been sent by the KGB to dissemble was, almost by definition, beyond challenge. When it came to espionage operations against the Soviet Union, they were the four most powerful men in the CIA. A serious disagreement with them might well damage an officer’s career. Besides, very few officers outside their circle knew enough about the case to form an independent judgment. The facts were held very tightly, Bagley explained, because “if Nosenko was a KGB plant, there was a KGB spy within CIA. This is not the sort of thing one wants to spread widely.” The logic was flawless, but the extreme secrecy that resulted effectively quenched any dissenting opinions.

  As the years passed, however, and the circle of knowledge inevitably expanded, a small school of Nosenko believers began to develop. Invariably, they were men who scorned the double-cross school of counterintelligence and were satisfied that the KGB would never deliberately give away as many secrets as Nosenko had. Nosenko had given up the Soviet spy Vassall, the bugging of the American Embassy in Moscow, and a host of leads to such Americans as ANDREY. He had also confirmed Golitsin’s warning about the homosexual Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union.

  After listening to Golitsin, Canada’s RCMP was convinced that he could only be describing John Watkins, a close friend of Prime Minister Lester Pearson and a noted academician, who had served in Moscow during the 1950s. With only Golitsin’s information to go on, however, the RCMP was reluctant to accuse such a distinguished and well-connected man of treason. But Nosenko seconded the story, adding so much convincing detail that it could no longer be ignored. According to Nosenko, Watkins’s KGB case officer had arranged in 1955 for then Foreign Minister Pearson to meet with Khrushchev at his dacha in the Crimea. Nosenko told of a drunken dinner party at which Khrushchev raised toast after toast of vodka to his Canadian guests. As his tongue loosened, Khrushchev began to mock Watkins with thinly veiled remarks about his homosexuality. During a toast to women, he leered at Watkins and said that not everybody present loved women. Nosenko’s account of the dinner party was later partially confirmed by no less a source than Pearson, who wrote in his memoirs that “Khrushchev was determined … to put us all ‘under the table’ ” and that while “the atmosphere became mellower and mellower John Watkins … looked less and less happy.” Acting on Nosenko’s testimony, the RCMP rousted Watkins from retirement in Paris and placed him under intense interrogation. He confessed his homosexuality but steadfastly denied that he had ever been recruited by the KGB. Just as the RCMP was about to abandon the interrogation, Watkins suffered a heart attack and died. Though he never confessed, there was little doubt within the RCMP or the CIA that he had been blackmailed into doing the KGB’s bidding.

  Would the KGB really direct a defector to reveal so much in order to establish his bona fides? “There is no precedent that we know of for the Soviets giving information of this sensitivity away,” John Hart insisted. George Kisvalter, the Agency’s premier case officer, who had handled Popov and Penkovsky, the best agents the CIA ever had, argued that the Russians “would be crazy to give [Vassall] up … the precedent of giving up such an agent would be almost anathema to the future recruitment of agents.”

  Such homilies made little impression on the double-cross disciples for whom the quality of the intelligence given up was merely a measure of the magnitude of the deception to come. “It is a straightforward counterespionage technique,” Bagley insisted, citing a captured KGB document as his source. “It stated that just catching American spies isn’t enough, for the enemy can always start again with new ones,” he recalled. “Therefore, said this KGB document, disinformation operations are essential. And among the purposes of such operations … is ‘to negate and discredit authentic information the enemy has obtained.’ I believe that Nosenko’s mission in 1962 involved just that—covering and protecting KGB sources threatened by [Golitsin’s] defection.” Yet there had to be some point at which the double-cross equation went off the graph, some truth the KGB would not give up in the name of deception. The case of Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson seemed to be that point.

  Nosenko told the CIA that prior to his defection there had been rumors circulating in Moscow Center of a tremendous new penetration in France. A friend of his in the KGB’s technical services division had actually gone to Paris to help process the take, Nosenko said. He assumed that the penetration was in some way related to the KGB’s recent development of an X-ray device capable of reading combination locks, the brainchild of a grotesque squad of safecrackers who had lost all their teeth to the radiation it emitted. Nosenko’s rumors became fact on November 25, 1964, when Sergeant Johnson confessed to the greatest wholesale compromise of military secrets in the nation’s history.

  As the case was later reconstructed in an authoritative exposé of the KGB by John Barron, Johnson left his guard post at the Armed Forces Courier Center near Paris a few minutes past midnight on Sunday, December 15, 1962, carrying a blue Air France flight bag crammed with secret documents. He drove his crotchety Citroën to a service road near Orly Airport where a gray Mercedes waited. Johnson handed the flight bag to Feliks Ivanov of the KGB and received in return an identical blue bag filled with wine and food. Within five minutes he was back at his post while Ivanov sped toward the Soviet Embassy in the center of Paris, where a team of KGB technicians flown in from Moscow via Algeria waited in a third-floor room. For one hour the technicians worked with hushed intensity, photographing the contents of the flight bag. At fifteen minutes past three, Ivanov parked his Mercedes on a dirt road next to a small cemetery five miles from Orly. Johnson drove up, exchanged flight bags with Ivanov once again, and returned to the Courier Center to await his relief at six A.M. On the way home that morning, Johnson stopped at a telephone booth to leave a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes with an X penciled on the inside, the sign that the documents had been safely returned.

  That clockwork maneuver was the product of nine years’ perseverance by the KGB which had begun in 1953 when a disgruntled Johnson left his Army post in West Berlin, took the tram to the Karlshorst stop in East Berlin, and offered to defect. The KGB gently deflected Johnson’s offer and instead maintained a desultory, mostly unproductive contact with him until March of 1961, when he was transferred to the Courier Center, the funnel point for all classified documents passing between Washington and NATO command posts in Europe. The center was one of the most enticing and impregnable espionage targets in the free world. An armed guard was on duty around the clock, and two steel doors barred the entrance to the vault that housed the documents. The first door was secured by a metal bar with combination locks at each end. The second had a key lock. No one could open the vault without the key and both combinations. No one was allowed inside the vault alone. On weekends a single guard was left to watch the vault, but both doors were locked and the guard had neither the key nor the two combinations needed to open it.

  Coached by the KGB, Johnson managed to make a clay impression of the key and to retrieve the combination to one of the other locks from a piece of scratch paper carelessly thrown into a wastebasket. The final combination eluded him until the fall of 1962, when he volunteered for weekend guard duty. Alone in the center from six P.M. Saturday until six A.M. Sunday, Johnson worked with a portable X-ray machine that when fitted over the lock revealed the combination. The final barrier overcome, Johnson and his KGB accomplices managed to loot the vault on seven separate occasions before he was finally transferred to another post in the fall of 1963.

  Nosenko knew none of these details. His information had not been specific enough to pinpoint Johnson as even a suspect in the case. Johnson had done himself in. At the end of his mental tether, he had gone AWOL, then surrendered to police in Reno, Nevada, and confessed. Still, Nosenko had told the CIA of a major penetration in Paris, a penetration that until his defection had gone totally undetected. Surely the KGB would not deliberately have alerted an unsuspecting United States to such a hemorrhaging of secrets. There were other ways to establish Nosenko’s bona fides.

  No soon
er was this argument made in favor of Nosenko than a counterintelligence analysis of the Johnson case suggested that the KGB had long since given up the operation as blown. After his seventh entry into the vault, Johnson had fallen asleep and failed to return to the cemetery at the scheduled time to retrieve the documents from his KGB controller, Ivanov. If the documents were not returned to the vault before Johnson was relieved at six A.M., the game would be over. Shortly after five A.M., Johnson woke up, looked at his watch, realized what had happened, and dashed frantically out the door to his car. The flight bag full of documents was sitting on the front seat, left by Ivanov in a lastditch effort to save the operation. Johnson returned the documents to the vault, completing the job only seconds before his relief arrived. Unwilling to admit to Ivanov that he had nearly ruined so valuable an operation by falling asleep, Johnson concocted a story that an officer had arrived without warning to pick up some documents, making it impossible for him to break away for the rendezvous— a story that conflicted with the fact that withdrawals from the vault were never made on weekends and that two commissioned officers were required to sign for all documents. Sensing a trap, the KGB terminated the operation.

  According to this analysis, the KGB had every reason to believe that the operation had been blown and that Johnson had switched his allegiance back to the United States. As far as the KGB was concerned, Nosenko had told the CIA nothing it didn’t already know. The fact that the KGB was mistaken did not detract from the force of the argument.

  Angleton and his staff, so quick to discount Nosenko’s giveaways, ignored the fact that the same calculus could be used against much of Golitsin’s information. It was true that Golitsin had provided leads that narrowed the search for the KGB’s source SASHA to the diminutive Igor Orlov, but by then the CIA had already terminated Orlov’s services. He had become a handling problem and had been brought back from Germany and resettled in Washington. Orlov acknowledged having had a couple of run-ins with West German police, but insisted that the reason his CIA career ended was that he had accused an officer of stealing from one of his agents. In either case, Orlov was out of the spy business. Anyone who suspected him of being a KGB agent would logically have to entertain the possibility that he was just another giveaway.