A BETTER CIA BOOK THAN GEORGE “SLAM DUNK” TENET’S

It had been a while since I'd roused my old friend James Jesus Angleton, the late chief of CIA counterintelligence, and it was clearly time to do that, what with two recent books out about the CIA.

The one by George Tenet is all over the media, but the one by Tennent "Pete" Bagley, one of Angleton's colleagues, has been hardly mentioned.

Bagley's book centers on the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko to CIA in 1964, and the subsequent battle within the agency over whether Nosenko was a genuine defector or the key figure in a KGB deception operation designed to protect one or more Soviet "moles" inside the American government.

There was a huge internal fight. Eventually Nosenko was judged to be genuine. Bagley was on the other side, as was Angleton. Bagley's book, Spy Wars (just out from Caravan), contains lots of new information – much of it based on conversations with former (?) KGB officers and some stuff from Soviet archives – and a very important reflection on how such judgments are reached. Who better to navigate these still-churning waters than JJA himself?

So I revved up my old ouija board, and after several failed efforts I got him loud and clear.

ML: Hope you're well, good to hear your voice again.

JJA: Dittos. Ha! Bet you didn't know we get talk radio here.

(I have never been quite clear about where "here" was, but I let it pass.)

ML: There are a couple of new books about your favorite subject…

JJA: Really? New books about orchids? Or fly fishing? Or poetry?

ML: It's intelligence. Tenet's finally produced his memoirs, and your old pal Pete Bagley has a Nosenko book.

JJA: Oh, that. I read Bagley's manuscript some time ago, but so far I've only seen a few newspaper stories about the Tenet book.

ML: What do you think about Bagley's book? He sure treats you well. The conventional wisdom is that you were the driving force behind the anti-Nosenko campaign, largely because you were totally convinced by another defector named Golitsyn.

But Bagley's account makes you a fairly marginal figure. He says you gave him the Golitsyn file at the very beginning, when Bagley and most of his colleagues were very excited about Nosenko, but then you more or less drop out of the picture.

JJA: I thought that Golitsyn's story checked out, and I thought his debriefs should be the starting point for the evaluation of Nosenko. But I didn't do much of the analysis; that was done by Bagley and his group, and supervised by Dave Murphy, the head of the Soviet Bloc Division. Five or six years after Nosenko's arrival, I gave some of Nosenko's debriefs to Golitsyn, who knew that several of Nosenko's claims about his own KGB career were false.

ML: On Bagley's account, you didn't have to be a counterintelligence maven to see that Nosenko wasn't very credible. Why did so many people at CIA think he was?

JJA: The Oswald business was very important, I think. Remember that Nosenko claimed to have read the KGB file on Oswald, which he claimed showed there had been no effort by the KGB to recruit Oswald. There were lots of Americans who wanted to believe that, as you can imagine, even though it was ridiculous on its face.

I mean, Oswald was a Marine who undoubtedly had information the KGB would have wanted: things about the Marines' rules of engagement, methods of communication, internal security methods, and so forth. Nobody in his right mind could believe that the KGB would have no interest in Oswald.

ML: In fact, a congressional committee officially said they thought Nosenko was lying, right?

JJA: Right. And after the Cold War, Bagley decided to contact some of Nosenko's old enemies from the KGB, and found much more proof of Nosenko's deceptions.

ML: Yes, and he tells several stories I had never heard before about the ways in which the Soviets deceived Western intelligence services. I had known about "the Trust," of course, the organization that was created shortly after the Russian Revolution, claiming to be an anti-Soviet resistance.

It was eventually supported by European governments, and the working relationships were so close that the Soviets were able to penetrate those governments. But there were others quite like it, and they succeeded time after time. Spy Wars is important for those things alone.

JJA: Bagley and Murphy knew that the Soviets were willing to make enormous sacrifices, even of their own high-ranking people, in order to protect their successes in penetrating Western governments. And they were extremely effective in creating deceptions against us. Look at the Penkovsky business that Bagley talks about.

ML: Yes, indeed. They knew Penkovsky – who provided us with very valuable information – was working for us almost from the first, didn't they?

JJA: They did, undoubtedly because they had a source – a mole – in the Intelligence Community. If they had arrested Penkovsky right away, we would have been alerted to the situation, and might have found the mole. So instead they waited a year, and created the myth that they had found him out thanks to good surveillance work.

ML: A myth that again came from Nosenko.

JJA: Precisely. The real point of Nosenko's disinformation was not simply to allay our suspicions about KGB involvement with Oswald, but to protect their assets inside CIA.

ML: Bagley talks about a veteran KGB operative who told him that Golitsyn had fingered him. Bagley said, "You mean that (you were told) that Golitsyn knew you and presumably identified you…?" But the KGB guy said, "No, I mean what I told you: They said Golitsyn had. They knew."

JJA: If that is true, it means that the KGB had access to what Golitsyn was telling us. They probably had someone on the CIA staff who was reading Golitsyn's debriefs. Maybe even one of my own guys…

ML: So let's go back to the basic question once again. Why was Nosenko whitewashed?

JJA: Bagley has it right. In part it's self-deception. CIA people aren't any different from the rest of mankind, after all, and nobody wants to accept unpleasant truths, especially when they require unpleasant action, like investigating friends and colleagues, or changing your security system or your military cyphers.

ML: Okay, that's part of it. But human actions generally have many sources, don't you think?

JJA: To be sure. The other big reason was a near-total turnover in leadership within the Soviet Bloc Division. Bagley was sent overseas, Murphy moved on, and so forth. The fight over Nosenko was extremely divisive, and lots of people were tired of it.

ML: Once I asked Dick Helms [Richard Helms, CIA Director 1966-1973] what he thought about the case. He made a face, and said "I don't think we'll ever know." He was certainly not convinced of Nosenko's bona fides.

JJA: No. Now there was a fine man. A cut above Mr. Tenet, it seems to me.

ML: Yeah, Dick Helms was a high-class gentleman. I can't imagine he would stoop to writing a long, whiny book shortly after leaving the Agency, as George Tenet has. It's unbecoming, don't you think?

JJA: I certainly do. I never wrote anything, as you know. And it seems Mr. Tenet was in such a hurry, he couldn't be bothered to check basic facts, which is a terrible reflection on his lack of professionalism.

ML: Yeah. He describes – in some detail – events that never took place, like a conversation with Perle coming out of the White House on a day Perle wasn't even in the country.

JJA: Haha, well, that's what you get when you're lazy. He should have learned from the KGB that lies are precious, you have to be very attentive to them, nurture them, protect them. If they can be exposed easily, they're worthless, and they end up damaging the liar.

ML: And this is a guy who goes around talking about the importance of "spycraft…"

(At which point I started to get a lot of static from the ouija board. Somehow the board always seems to start blowing its gaskets when I say something provocative.)

JJA: Spycraft my ***!! If anyone in the KGB had ever made a gaffe like that he'd be put at a desk in an poorly heated building in the worst part of Moscow, forging visas for ten years.

ML: Well, nobody in the KGB has ever written his memoirs, so far as I know.

JJA: (more static) Marcus Wolff (still more static)… great liar…

And he was gone. I know Marcus Wolff was the head of the STASI, the East German KGB, and he wrote a memoir of sorts.  I guess Angleton had a dim view of the book's reliability. I put it down on the to-do list.