All such conjecture aside, the simple truth was that for all Golitsin’s alarms about moles and disinformation campaigns, Nosenko had provided the CIA with at least as many confirmed leads to Soviet penetrations as Golitsin—if not more. Hart asserted flatly that “quantitatively and qualitatively, the information given by [Golitsin] was much smaller than that given by Nosenko.” Yet Nosenko languished in solitary confinement while Golitsin served as what one officer called “a trusted contract agent being paid a very respectable sum.” Golitsin “was given access to all the debriefings of Nosenko … to the tapes themselves … [and] allowed to think up questions which were to be asked Nosenko,” Hart said. “Angleton will apply certain standards to other people that he was never willing to apply to his pet,” a chief of the Soviet Bloc Division grumbled.
The interrogation of Nosenko was resumed at the end of 1964. “The first day they kept me under 24 hours interrogation,” he later testified. “All interrogations were done in a hostile manner…. I … asked how long it would continue. I was told that I would be there 3,860 days and even more…. I was taken by guards blindfolded and handcuffed in a car and delivered to an airport and put in a plane. I was taken to another location where I was put into a concrete room with bars on a door.” According to Hart, Nosenko’s new prison had been “built especially to house him” and resembled nothing so much as “a bank vault.” It “was a very expensive construction because it consisted of heavy steel reinforced concrete.” As Nosenko described it, his cell was furnished with “a single steel bed and a mattress—no pillow, no sheet and no blanket. During winter it was very cold and I asked to give me a blanket which I received after some time. I was watched day and night through TV camera. Trying to pass the time a couple of times I was making from threads chess set. And everytime when I finished those sets immediately guards were entering in my cell and taking them from me.” According to Hart, “He also made himself a calendar out of lint from his clothing…. He was desperately trying to keep track of the time…. But in the course of his having been compelled to sweep up his room or clean up his room, why these calendars were of course ruined, so he had to start all over again.” Nosenko said, “I was desperately wanting to read, and once when I was given a toothpaste I found in a toothpaste box a piece of paper with description of components of this toothpaste. I was trying to read it under blanket but guard noticed it and again it was taken from me.” After nearly two years in the vault, Nosenko was granted thirty minutes a day for exercise in a small yard next to his cell. “The area was surrounded by a chain-link fence and by a second fence that I could not see through,” Nosenko said. “The only thing I could see was the sky.”
Officially, this inhuman treatment was referred to as “highly secure conditions” that were required “to permit extensive and prolonged debriefing.” But of the 1,277 days Nosenko was held captive, he was questioned on only 292. Memos danced around that fact by referring to “the additional need to provide Mr. Nosenko with continuing personal protection since there was the distinct possibility that he would be targeted for execution if the Soviets should discover his whereabouts.” That last was an especially disingenuous piece of rationalization, since those who had directed Nosenko’s confinement were convinced that he was still working for the KGB.
Through it all, Nosenko stuck to his story no matter how many holes his captors were able to poke in it. He said, for example, that during the early 1950s he had spent a great deal of time trying to recruit a military attaché assigned to the American Embassy in Moscow. But Nosenko could not identify the officer’s photograph and did not know that he had subsequently been expelled from the Soviet Union after he was caught receiving documents from a Russian citizen. Nosenko also said that in early 1961 he had received daily reports on the KGB’s surveillance of a CIA dead drop in Moscow. But CIA records showed that the dead drop, which had been used for communications with Penkovsky, had not been set up until late 1961. Nosenko, who maintained that his primary intelligence target had been the American Embassy, did not know which floors were set aside for classified work. And the man who claimed he had been assigned to Moscow Center from 1953 until his defection in 1964 could not describe the KGB cafeteria.
At one point, Bagley thought Nosenko was about to break. When he was unable to provide any details about a case he had supposedly run for the KGB, Bagley asked why he wouldn’t admit he hadn’t handled the case. Nosenko sat silent for a moment and then said that if he admitted he hadn’t handled the case he would also have to admit that he was not the man he said he was. There was another pause, and then Nosenko pulled himself together and went on.
Finally, in August of 1966, Helms lost patience and gave the Counterintelligence and Soviet Bloc Divisions sixty days in which to conclude their case against Nosenko. He rejected a request to interrogate Nosenko under the influence of sodium amytal, forcing the interrogators to resort once again to polygraph. Nosenko had already failed the polygraph once, but the results were worthless because of the intimidation to which he had been subjected. The second test was no better. According to Hart, Nosenko’s examiner began by telling him “that he was a fanatic and that there was no evidence to support his legend and your future is now zero.” During the examination, Nosenko was left strapped to the chair for hours on end while his interrogators took “lunch breaks.” One “lunch break” lasted three hours and fifteen minutes; another, four hours. “There was no intention that this 1966 series of polygraphs would be valid,” Hart said. Bagley’s handwritten notes revealed the true intent: “To gain more insight into points of detail which we could use in fabricating an ostensible Nosenko confession … [which] would be useful in any eventual disposal of Nosenko.” Bagley was willing to contemplate almost anything to avoid what he called the “devastating consequences” of awarding Nosenko his bona fides. He jotted down, “for my fleeting use only,” a list of “alternative actions” that could be taken “to liquidate and insofar as possible to clean up traces of a situation in which CIA could be accused of illegally holding Nosenko.” Fifth on the list was “liquidate the man.” Number six was “render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug et cetera). Possible aim, commitment to loony bin.” Number seven was “commitment to loony bin without making him nuts.”
Bagley compiled a report more than 900 pages in length, which detail by eye-glazing detail dissected the discrepancies in Nosenko’s story. “Nosenko claimed that his operational success during 1959 earned him a commendation from the KGB chairman,” Bagley wrote on page 127. “He has since retracted all claims to any awards during his KGB service.” Nosenko claimed to have “thoroughly reviewed Oswald’s file within hours of Kennedy’s assassination,” Bagley noted on page 307. But “Nosenko later told CIA on one occasion that he ‘only skimmed the file’ and on another that he had it in his possession about 20 minutes.” Nosenko was not aware that Oswald and his wife had sent visa requests to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Bagley continued. “Nosenko’s apparent ignorance of Oswald’s communications with the Soviet Embassy in Washington discredits his claim to complete knowledge of all aspects of the KGB relationship with Oswald.” On and on for 900 pages. All told, said Bagley, there were “hundreds of specific points of doubt such as had never arisen in any of the scores of defections of Soviet Bloc intelligence officers before Nosenko.” A decade after compiling the report, Bagley would still remember “at least 20 clear cases of Nosenko’s lying about KGB activity and about the career which gave him authority to tell of it, and a dozen examples of his ignorance of matters within his claimed area of responsibility, for which there is no innocent explanation.” Bagley’s conclusion was that Nosenko had held none of the jobs he said he had held, and that he was not the man he claimed to be.
Bagley forwarded his report to Angleton’s Counterintelligence Division, and now Angleton found himself in something of a dilemma. Although he had never deigned to meet with Nosenko, Angleton had from the start been the guiding light behind Bagle
y’s suspicions. It was he who first initiated Bagley into the dark world of Golitsin and planted the notion that Nosenko had been sent to protect the KGB’s mole. But despite his conviction that Nosenko was a dispatched disinformation agent, Angleton could not accept Bagley’s report because it implied that “his pet,” Golitsin, was not totally reliable. For all his warnings about “serious signs of disinformation in this affair,” Golitsin had at least confirmed that Nosenko was a bona fide KGB officer. “He did give evidence confirming that Nosenko had had certain jobs, which was in agreement with what Nosenko told us he had done,” Hart said. Bagley’s report would not concede even that small point, and Angleton balked. “Chief CI said that he did not see how we could submit a final report … if it contained suggestions that Golitsin had lied to us about certain aspects of Nosenko’s past,” a staff memo recorded. The Counterintelligence and Soviet Bloc divisions bargained Bagley’s “thousand-pager,” as it came to be known, down to 447 pages.
No matter how long the report, no matter how strongly Angleton and Bagley felt, the CIA could not bring itself to declare Nosenko a dispatched agent of the KGB. The consequences were too grave. A man’s life was at stake. If Nosenko were wrongly sent back to the Soviet Union as a false defector, the CIA would be sending an innocent man—a man who had provided valuable intelligence to the United States—to his death. Beyond that, the repudiation of Nosenko, the bearer of assurances that Oswald was not a Soviet operative, would logically require a reopening of the investigation into Kennedy’s death. Angleton’s staff had assigned an 85 percent probability to the likelihood that Nosenko was a false agent. Given the consequences, 85 percent wasn’t enough.
Curiously, Angleton and his assistants seemed to have overlooked the single most basic and telling point about Nosenko’s bona fides. If the CIA was as deeply penetrated as Goleniewski and Golitsin said it was, as Angleton and his aides believed it was, word of Nosenko’s first meetings with Bagley and Kisvalter in Geneva in June of 1962 would have gotten back to Moscow Center. From that moment on, Nosenko would either be under KGB control or dead. The mere fact that he should reappear in Geneva was persuasive evidence that he had been sent to deceive. “If you accept the fact that there was high-level penetration of the CIA,” an Agency officer said, “it’s out of the question that Nosenko could have returned from Moscow a genuine article.” Even had the point been raised, however, it would not have clinched the case against Nosenko, since proof of a high-level penetration of the CIA was as elusive as Nosenko’s bona fides.
Casting about for some way out of the quandary, Helms called for a review of the entire affair. Bruce Solie, a senior member of the CIA’s Office of Security who had expended considerable time and energy over the past five years tracking down Nosenko’s leads, was assigned to write a critique of Bagley’s report. Solie took the straightforward view that a defector’s bona fides should be judged by the quality of his information, and in the case of Nosenko he felt that too much attention had been paid to breaking his story down and not enough to finding out everything he could tell the CIA about KGB operations. Despite the 1,277 days of confinement and the 292 days of interrogation, Solie concluded that Nosenko had not been thoroughly debriefed. Until he was, and until all his leads could be run down, Nosenko’s bona fides remained an open question.
In November of 1967 Nosenko was taken from his cell and “transferred blindfolded and handcuffed” to a safe house near Washington, D.C., where at last, Nosenko said, “I had a room with much better conditions.” For the first time since his defection, Nosenko was in an atmosphere unclouded by the dark murmurings of Golitsin and the double-cross theories of counterintelligence. Now Solie commenced an interrogation that was to last without letup for nine months.
“I was interrogated on this case … several times,” Nosenko lamented. “It was very, very strictly put, everything, everything.”
“Yes,” Solie responded, “but what I want from you is—not strictly put—I want you to put it in your own words.”
Solie’s aim, unlike Bagley’s, was not to break Nosenko but to elicit information from him. The results of his interrogations were forwarded to the FBI, which later reported “that a minimum of nine new cases have been developed as a result of this reexamination and that new information of considerable importance on old cases not previously available resulted from this effort.” Commenting on all these neglected leads, CIA Deputy Director Rufus Taylor told Helms, “Before we are through with this the FBI just might level official criticism at this Agency for its previous handling of this case.”
In August of 1968 Nosenko was given a third lie-detector test, minus all the intimidation of the first two. This time he passed. In October Solie submitted a 283-page report that disputed Bagley’s “thousand-pager” and concluded that “Nosenko is identical to the person he claims to be.” Solie went further and specifically ruled out the possibility that Nosenko had been dispatched by the Soviet government to give false information about Oswald.
Solie’s report was immediately branded a “whitewash” and “despicable” by members of Angleton’s staff, but the Agency’s Deputy Director bought it. “I am now convinced that there is no reason to conclude that Nosenko is other than what he has claimed to be, that he has not knowingly and willfully withheld information from us, that there is no conflict between what we have learned from him and what we have learned from other defectors or informants that would cast any doubts on his bona fides,” Rufus Taylor assured Helms in writing. “Most particularly, I perceive no significant conflict between the information Nosenko has provided and the information and opinions Golitsin has provided. Thus, I conclude that Nosenko should be accepted as a bona fide defector.”
Taylor convened a meeting that one participant described as “a final effort to get all of these warring factions to sit down and see if we could get a consensus,” but “nobody gave an inch.” The Counterintelligence Division still refused to accept Nosenko as genuine. Giving Nosenko the benefit of every doubt, there still seemed no innocent explanation for why SCOTCH, the KGB agent at the United Nations, had corroborated for the CIA the false elements in Nosenko’s story about his inflated rank and the nonexistent recall telegram. “There still remains a disagreement as to his bona fides,” Howard Osborn, the CIA’s Director of Security, reported to Helms. “But at least it has been agreed by all concerned that the problem of Nosenko’s bona fides and his rehabilitation and resettlement can be considered separately…. Nosenko is becoming increasingly restive and desirous of obtaining freedom on his own. After nearly five years of varying degrees of confinement, this desire, including that for feminine companionship, is understandable,” Osborn continued. “Something had to be done with Nosenko physically,” the head of the Soviet Bloc Division said. “You just couldn’t leave him in a cage.” As a first step, Nosenko was permitted a two-week “vacation” in Florida under the watchful eyes of two CIA guards. Meanwhile, Angleton was preparing a new set of questions to be put to Nosenko upon his return.
Helms, still deeply suspicious, signaled an end to the dispute by awarding Solie a medal for his work in rehabilitating Nosenko. Resettling Nosenko “was the only viable option left to us,” Helms said later. Freedom for Nosenko would remain a relative thing, however. “We will occupy contiguous quarters and … he will be required for an undetermined period to let us know where he is going and when he leaves these quarters,” a CIA memo on “the Rehabilitation and Resettlement of Nosenko” said. “We will, initially at least, provide for technical coverage of his telephone and living quarters and will, within the extent of our capability, cover him through surveillance when he leaves these quarters.” Nosenko was provided with a new identity, and in March of 1969 he was hired by the CIA as a consultant and eventually paid all of the money Bagley had originally promised him in 1964.
Looking back on the affair, Helms later said, “I don’t think there has ever been anything more frustrating in my life.” That was a considerable admission for a man
who had spent his entire adult life wrestling with the inevitable uncertainties of intrigue. So much depended on Nosenko’s bona fides. There was, of course, the question of Soviet involvement in Kennedy’s murder, but beyond that there was the mystery of the mole. The passage of time might ease the controversy surrounding the President’s death. But time only made more pressing the need to know whether Nosenko had been sent to sidetrack Angleton from Golitsin’s leads to the KGB’s man inside the CIA. Kennedy was gone, beyond avenging, but the mole—if he existed—would still be burrowing deeper and deeper toward the heart of the CIA. So the question burned even brighter than before, but the answer was receding farther and farther into the maze of transcripts, analyses, and memos, of inaccuracies, contradictions, and lies, that surrounded the investigation of Nosenko. The CIA had erected its own wilderness of mirrors. Whatever Nosenko had been to begin with, the fear that he might be a disinformation agent had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same could be said about the hunt for the mole.
Ides of March
8
Bill Harvey, the man who had fingered Kim Philby, played no part in the hunt for the mole, MONGOOSE and his confrontation with the President’s brother had destroyed his career. Events seemed to mock Harvey. His career had reached its peak in 1961 when he was placed in charge of the Cuba task force and introduced to President Kennedy as the American 007, yet that same year he discovered that his greatest triumph—the Berlin tunnel—had been blown from the start by George Blake. His career had plummeted in 1963 with his sacking from the task force and his exile to Rome, yet that same year Philby had fled to Moscow, providing the ultimate proof of the case Harvey had made twelve years before. Nor could it have escaped Harvey that while he had been assigned to assassinate a foreign leader for the good of his country, it was his own President who had been murdered. Now, once again, on the evening of October 22, 1966, events trumped Harvey.
Wilderness of Mirrors Page 21