The War of the Defectors
In June 1962, a thirty-five-year-old KGB officer attached to the Soviet disarmament delegation in Geneva approached an American diplomat and offered to trade information for money. That request was the beginning of one of the most controversial episodes in CIA history, the case of Yuriy Nosenko,* a key to unlocking important pieces of the Oswald puzzle.
Nosenko sought permanent asylum in the U.S. in January 1964, only two months after the Kennedy assassination. His story stunned the CIA. He claimed to be a lieutenant colonel responsible for compromising Americans visiting Moscow. That meant Oswald was under his jurisdiction when the Marine first defected to the Soviet Union. After the assassination, he was temporarily assigned to investigate whether there was ever any KGB-Oswald relationship. According to Nosenko, although Soviet intelligence kept Oswald under surveillance, it viewed him as mentally unfit, had not debriefed him, and had no relationship with him. If that was true, it meant the KGB and the Soviet Union were absolved of any complicity in JFK’s murder. If it was false, Nosenko could be a phony defector, intended, among other things, to deflect the Warren Commission from focusing on evidence of the real Soviet role with Oswald. The overall question of whether he was a bona fide defector or a KGB plant became the most divisive issue within the Agency since its establishment: Is Nosenko a bona fide defector, and is his information about Oswald reliable?
When Nosenko contacted an American diplomat in 1962, the CIA was immediately notified. It dispatched thirty-seven-year-old Tennant “Pete” Bagley and an agent fluent in Russian, George Kisevalter, to meet Nosenko four times at a safe house near Geneva’s center.1 Nosenko said he was dissatisfied with the Soviet system and asked for some money in exchange for information. He refused to be contacted inside the USSR for fear of exposure.2
CIA transcripts reveal that at those meetings, Nosenko provided critical leads on a number of intelligence cases. Among other disclosures, he exposed KGB spies in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the British admiralty, and in the U.S. Army;3 revealed new Soviet surveillance technologies; pinpointed the location of hidden microphones in the U.S. embassy; and startled his CIA contacts by claiming that both Canadian ambassador John Watkins and prominent U.S. newspaper columnist Joe Alsop were homosexuals who were compromised by the KGB.4*
Bagley was ecstatic with the information, and not only considered Nosenko bona fide but the most important Soviet agent ever recruited by the CIA.5 However, Bagley was shocked when he returned to CIA headquarters because the chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, was convinced that no matter what Nosenko said, he was a KGB plant.
The reason for Angleton’s distrust was another defector who had arrived in America six months earlier, Anatoliy Golitsyn. Golitsyn had told the extremely cynical Angleton that the CIA was penetrated by a high-ranking KGB agent code-named Sasha. The possibility that the CIA was compromised, as British intelligence had been by Kim Philby, was Angleton’s worst fear. Accepting Golitsyn’s revelations without hesitation, he embarked the CIA on a twenty-year hunt for a phantom mole that destroyed careers of good officers and split the Agency.
Not only was Angleton convinced the mole existed, but Golitsyn further warned him that the KGB would send “defectors” intended to deflect the interest in Sasha. That is how they viewed Nosenko. When Nosenko was asked if there was a KGB mole in the CIA, he said no. Told of his reply, Golitsyn reached an instant conclusion: “This is disinformation. The KGB wants me to appear bad to you. This is going to damage my leads.”6 Bagley, too, was soon convinced Nosenko was a plant. His information was dismissed either as stale or as exposing expendable KGB operations.
Completely unaware the CIA thought he was a double agent, Nosenko prepared for his eventual goal, defection. For the remainder of 1962 and all of 1963, he committed to memory the details of more than three hundred new leads and almost two thousand names for the Agency.7 In January 1964, Nosenko arrived in Geneva as part of the Soviet disarmament delegation and immediately used his prearranged signal to call a meeting with the CIA. The same two agents who had met him in 1962, Bagley and Kisevalter, flew in from Washington.8
Nosenko first surprised the agents by announcing, “Gentlemen, I am not going back, so how about that?”9 Bagley, convinced Nosenko was a fake, tried to dissuade him from defecting, encouraging him to stay in the Soviet Union even though Nosenko had disclosed his knowledge about Oswald.10 At a second meeting, a week later, the disagreement over his defection continued, with Nosenko increasingly concerned the KGB might uncover his treachery. Five days later, in the final meeting, Nosenko announced he had received a cable ordering him home immediately. He feared the KGB had unmasked him and his return meant arrest and execution.11 “Gentlemen,” he told the two CIA agents, “I don’t know about you, but this hour, this minute, I have defected. I am not going back.”12 The story of the cable left the CIA with little choice since the Agency feared the repercussions of losing an agent who might have information about Oswald. Headquarters authorized his defection, and within days he passed through Germany and was in the U.S.*
Nosenko’s statement about the recall cable and his declaration that he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel are central issues used to contest his credibility. There was no recall cable. Confronted with this fact, Nosenko explained he fabricated the story because he feared that otherwise Bagley would not allow him to defect.13 The story about the cable accomplished its purpose, forcing the CIA to spirit him to the West. “To this day, I do not regret making that false statement,” he says.† “Without that ‘cable,’ they would have brushed me off.”14 If he had been a plant, the KGB would almost have certainly provided him with a cable to keep his cover story intact.
The questions raised about his declaration that he was a lieutenant colonel are more complex. Many assassination-conspiracy books say that CIA document experts determined that Nosenko could not have held the rank or position he claimed in the KGB and that travel papers he had in his possession had been concocted to give his defection credibility.15 Are these doubts about his veracity warranted?
When Nosenko first contacted the CIA in 1962 he was indeed a captain. In the spring of 1963, however, he was appointed to lieutenant colonel by his close friend Major General Oleg Gribanov, the director of the Second Chief Directorate. ‡ Although his rank was approved by the Party Committee and Personnel Directorate, Nosenko had to wait for the KGB chairman’s annual approval of all promotions. His travel document did say he was a lieutenant colonel, but since he defected before the chairman’s approval, the CIA could not verify that rank.16 The Agency mistakenly assumed the higher rank was part of a false legend prepared for Nosenko.
When Nosenko first arrived in the U.S., he was placed in a safe house. He did not know that his CIA debriefers were only interested in exposing him as a liar. However, when J. Edgar Hoover learned about him, he immediately obtained access for the FBI. A deep-cover FBI informant at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, code-named Fedora, personally confirmed to Hoover that Nosenko was bona fide and that his defection had caused an uproar in the highest Kremlin circles.
The FBI believed Nosenko about Oswald and supported his request to testify before the Warren Commission. But Angleton outmaneuvered them. Richard Helms, then deputy director of plans, met privately with Earl Warren on June 24, 1964, and informed him the CIA doubted Nosenko’s credibility.17 Helms warned that if the Commission used his information and it was a lie, it would ruin the rest of their work.18 Nosenko did not testify and is not even mentioned in the Commission’s twenty-six volumes.
Helms did not tell the Chief Justice that since early April, with the backing of attorney general Robert Kennedy, Nosenko had been under hostile interrogation, treated as a captured spy rather than a voluntary defector. The FBI was denied access to him, and his CIA jailers expected him to crack within a few weeks. Robert Kennedy called frequently to discover whether he had confessed yet.
Nosenko’s ordeal had started on April 4, 1964, when he was driven to a three-story safe house in a Washington suburb. He was given a medical exam and then strapped to a polygraph machine.19 The operator, Nick Stoiaken, knew the CIA thought Nosenko was a liar. After an hour of questions, Stoiaken made a big show of discussing the prearranged results with some of the CIA personnel. Then Bagley appeared and denounced Nosenko as a “liar.” Several guards rushed into the room. Nosenko was stripped, inspected inside his mouth, ears, and rectum, and then marched into the house’s tiny attic, which would serve as his prison for more than a year.
The windows were boarded over. The only furniture was a metal bed fastened to the middle of the floor. Guards watched him twenty-four hours a day through a wire mesh screen built into the door. The room had no heat or air-conditioning, and during the oppressive Washington summers it was like a furnace. Nosenko was given little food, allowed to shower only once a week, and not allowed a toothbrush or toothpaste.* Human contact was banned. There was no television, radio, reading material, exercise, or cigarettes. He was told he would be kept like that for twenty-five years. The interrogations, which began within days, were extremely aggressive. He was constantly attacked as a KGB plant and told his only chance for freedom was to confess. Over the months, the CIA agents became increasingly frustrated that he refused to admit he was a bogus defector. Robert Kennedy had long since stopped telephoning for an update, and the Warren Commission had released its report. Nosenko was a forgotten man, a prisoner of the CIA.
On August 13, 1965, after sixteen months closeted in the attic, Nosenko was moved by the CIA to a new prison, a top-secret facility constructed especially for him. Located on the grounds of the CIA’s training facility, Camp Peary, it made the attic seem luxurious. On a heavily wooded site on the ten-thousand-acre compound, Nosenko was locked inside a ten-foot-by-ten-foot windowless concrete bunker. A single bare bulb illuminated the room’s only piece of furniture, a metal bed so small that his feet hung over the edges. The luxuries from the attic—a pillow, sheet, and blanket—were gone. The bunker accentuated the weather, either brutally hot or freezing cold.20 A ceiling camera monitored him. His allotted food was lowered to the subsistence level. Documents reveal that while the government spent $1.5 million to construct and man the prison, it spent less than a dollar a day feeding him.
After four months, he was finally allowed to walk in a small enclosed yard that had been constructed outside his jail. It was the first time in nearly two years he had seen daylight or been in fresh air. The yard was encircled with a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, and several feet beyond was an eighteen-foot-high fence of solid material.21 The CIA did not want anyone, even at Camp Peary, to see what had become of him.
He tried to keep his sanity in a variety of ways. When his jailers finally allowed him to brush his teeth after two years in captivity, he was so starved for something to read that he secretly kept a printed piece of paper from the toothpaste package. Though it was only a list of ingredients, he kept rereading it until his guards saw him and confiscated it. Another time he painstakingly created a makeshift deck of cards from shreds of paper napkins. The guards watched him for several weeks and destroyed it on the day he completed it. The same happened to a chess set he fashioned from pieces of lint.22
Meanwhile, each subsequent Soviet defector who knew of the Nosenko case vouched for his bona fides.23* Most of them, like Colonel Oleg Gordievskiy, were quite surprised to learn that the CIA thought Nosenko was a plant, and told the Agency of the KGB’s panicked reactions when he had fled to the West.24 Nosenko had been tried in absentia and was to be executed on his recapture.† But to Angleton and Golitsyn, the moment a defector vouched for Nosenko’s bona fides, it branded that defector as a plant. Angleton concluded that in the decade after Golitsyn, the Soviets sent twenty-two phony defectors to the U.S.25 Today, the CIA and FBI consider every one of those defectors as bona fide.26
Instead of being persuaded by growing evidence that Nosenko might be authentic, Angleton and Bagley grew increasingly impatient and debated drugging him to hasten his breakdown. Internal documents show an assortment of drugs were considered, including a so-called truth serum, an amphetamine, and even LSD. Nosenko is positive he was drugged, recalling injections by CIA doctors, followed by days of panic and terror. “Once, following an injection, I couldn’t breathe,” he remembers. “I was dying.”27 His guards dragged him to a shower, where they ran alternating hot and cold water to revive him.28
In October 1966, two and a half years after he was placed into solitary confinement, and shortly after the incidents with drugs, a second polygraph was administered. Nosenko recalls it was “even uglier than the first.”29 Without any warning, the same doctor who had examined him in April 1964 conducted a physical. During the exam, the doctor inserted a gloved finger inside Nosenko’s rectum and, over his protests, wriggled it around for some ten minutes.30 The doctor suggested he liked the degradation. Nosenko is certain this was done to anger him and stimulate his blood pressure, a key factor in affecting polygraph readings.31
After the “exam,” he was immediately hooked to the machinery. The same operator, Nick Stoiaken, conducted the test. But instead of asking yes and no questions as on the first test, he spent an hour calling Nosenko a “liar” and asking demeaning questions about alleged homosexuality.32 Then Stoiaken took a lunch break, leaving Nosenko strapped to the machine. Guards ensured he did not move.
When Stoiaken returned a couple of hours later, he continued the questioning for another two hours.33 No matter how Nosenko responded or what the polygraph showed, Stoiaken said he was a liar. It was conducted so he would fail. Shortly after the test, Bagley presented him a fake confession that admitted he was a plant and there were moles inside the CIA. Nosenko took a pencil and turned to the last page. Summoning his last reserves of strength, he scrawled near the signature line, “Not true.”34
Bagley was infuriated. His desperation was evident when he soon made a list of how the festering case could be closed. Included among the choices were “liquidate the man,” “render him incapable of giving [a] coherent story (special dose of drug, etc),” or committing him to a “loony bin without making him nuts.”35
After the second polygraph, Nosenko was at his lowest point since defecting. But unknown to him, his fortunes were about to improve. In June 1966, Richard Helms became the Agency’s director.36 Although undecided about Nosenko’s bona fides, he knew the matter had to be resolved. Within several months of Helms’s taking office, he assigned a complete review to Bruce Solie, a sixteen-year veteran and the Agency’s most experienced spycatcher. To offset Helms’s moves, Angleton and Bagley produced a nine-hundred-page report detailing why Nosenko was a plant.
Without deciding whether Nosenko was bona fide, it took Solie six months to determine that the Angleton/Bagley work was seriously flawed, more an unchallenged prosecutor’s brief than an impartial report. As a result of Solie’s preliminary conclusions, CIA guards entered the concrete bunker, blindfolded, handcuffed, and shackled Nosenko, and stuffed him into the backseat of a car. He thought they were finally going to kill him. Instead, they drove him to a small CIA safe house in a Washington suburb. After three and a half years, he was no longer in solitary confinement. He was soon moved to a farmhouse, where he was given a comfortable bedroom, ate normal meals, and could exercise. However, he was still the Agency’s prisoner, and during 1968 Solie interviewed him, often six days a week. He found a very different man than the one portrayed by Angleton and Bagley.
In early 1968 the Soviet Division of the CIA, technically responsible for defectors, received a new director, Rolfe Kingsley, and he ordered a complete review of his department’s Nosenko files. In debriefing files tucked away in a safe, he was astonished to discover the defector had provided six solid leads about Soviet penetration of European allies. When the information was turned over to foreign governments, Soviet spies were arrested.37 Angleton dismissed them as disposable KGB assets.
In August 1968, after eight months of interviews with Solie, Nosenko had a third polygraph, the only valid test he was ever given. It was monitored by several Agency departments. He passed it, including those questions about whether he was telling the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald.38 One month later, Solie submitted his final 283-page report. It was the first CIA document to accept Nosenko as a bona fide defector. J. Edgar Hoover received a copy and dispatched FBI agents to interview Nosenko for the first time in over four years. They discovered nine new counterintelligence cases and seventy-five leads on pending cases.39
After Solie’s report, Nosenko’s conditions significantly improved. Although still confined to the farmhouse, he was allowed to read books and newspapers and given a small black-and-white television. Starved for news, he asked for the 1964–67 copies of the World Almanac. In December, almost five years after his arrival in the U.S., he was allowed to visit public places, as long as CIA handlers accompanied him.40
While Angleton watched with frustration, the Soviet Division’s independent review also declared Nosenko a bona fide defector. In March 1969, Helms employed him as an independent consultant on the KGB, at a salary of $16,500 per year, and arranged for limited compensation for his illegal imprisonment. By April, five years after he was locked into an attic, he was released from all security restrictions. He changed his name and married within a year.
All six directors of Central Intelligence who followed Helms agreed that Nosenko was a bona fide defector.41 The FBI never wavered from its initial determination of his bona fides. The official CIA position today is that Nosenko is the most valuable KGB defector to come to the West as of 1964.
Yet despite the gross injustice done to him, and the historical correction at the CIA, some still disparage his bona fides. Anthony Summers, in Conspiracy, dubs the Nosenko information about Oswald “a fairy story from the KGB” and, in particular, terms his testimony that the KGB had not questioned Oswald about his military service a “blithe assertion.”42 The first two polygraph results are sometimes used to malign his credibility, without any description about the conditions in which the tests were conducted. Edward Epstein, in Legend, says CIA “experts … carefully analyzed” the results and “[a]ccording to the evaluation by the Office of Security, Nosenko had failed his first lie detector test.”43 In Crossfire, Jim Marrs covers the barbaric multiyear treatment in three sentences.44 He then concludes: “Toward the end of the ordeal, Nosenko was given at least two lie detector tests by the CIA. He failed both.”
Assassination critics are not the only ones to use the first polygraph results to impugn Nosenko’s bona fides. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, in 1977–78, was the first government body, independent of the intelligence community, to study the case and was “unable to resolve the Nosenko matter.”45 The committee stated that his earlier handling by the CIA “virtually ruined him as a valid source of information about the assassination.”46 Moreover, it was certain Nosenko had lied about Oswald, either to the FBI and CIA in 1964 or to the committee in 1978, or to both. There were two reasons for its finding.
First, it commissioned an independent polygraph expert, Richard Arther, president of the Scientific Lie Detection, Inc., to evaluate Nosenko’s three polygraph tests. He concluded the second test (the most abusive exam) was “valid and reliable.”47 Yet Arther did not interview any of the participants, did not know of the hostile conditions surrounding the test, was not aware that Nosenko was strapped to the machine for nearly six hours, and was not given any of the operator’s tape recordings or handwritten notes. He reached his conclusion solely by reviewing the official, typed reports of the test.48
Second, the Select Committee used Nosenko’s statements from hostile interrogations to impeach his current testimony. In its own investigation in 1967, the CIA discovered there were massive errors in the translation of the interviews conducted before and during Nosenko’s imprisonment.49 Not only did the interrogators often misunderstand his broken English, but Bagley and Angleton further distorted the record by overlaying their own interpretations into the transcript. Those were the answers often used by the Select Committee to establish whether Nosenko’s 1978 testimony was consistent and truthful. While Nosenko pleaded that the hostile interrogations not be used against him, the committee’s counsel persisted. Finally, Nosenko refused to answer any more questions and the interview abruptly ended.
“I had expected a fair hearing from a congressional committee,” Nosenko told the author. “I was terribly disappointed. They seemed to have made up their minds before I ever spoke to them. The staff had been impressed by Golitsyn, and then by Angleton. No matter what I said, it wasn’t going to affect their decision. But they still performed their duty by talking to me. From the beginning, I sensed the hostility.”
Nosenko has been questioned twice about his CIA treatment, but the interview he granted for this book is the first that focused on Oswald. Although he is no longer a full-time counterintelligence consultant for the Agency, there are still paramount concerns for Nosenko’s security. Nothing about him can be reported, particularly personal details that might compromise his new identity. When Edward Jay Epstein briefly interviewed him in the mid-1970s, the same restrictions applied. At one point Epstein asked Nosenko where he had been relocated. Nosenko claims that after swearing him to secrecy, he revealed the state. Epstein printed it. “He blew me,” Nosenko remembers angrily. “It was treachery.”*
In 1964, the CIA drafted 130 questions it intended to ask Nosenko about Oswald but never did. In the interview for this book, those questions were put to him, and the substance of his answers are included in this and the following chapter. Also included are the revelations reported in an extensive four-part series in 1992 by Izvestiya about Oswald’s KGB file, No. 31451, domiciled in Minsk. The Izvestiya series not only provided details from the file but included interviews with those in Minsk who knew Oswald. That both supplements and confirms the information from Nosenko.†
When Oswald defected in 1959, a foreigner could not visit the USSR without a visa and the purchase of a preset package tour. That ensured all foreigners were in regular contact with personnel of the Soviet tourist agency, Intourist, which, according to Nosenko, was an organization made up entirely of KGB informants or agents.50 An Intourist guide, Rima Shirokova, played an important role in Oswald’s first weeks in Russia.
Oswald arrived in Helsinki on October 10, 1959, and applied for his visa from the Soviet consulate on October 12. He purchased $300 of Intourist vouchers.51 The Soviets issued his visa in two days,52 and it was valid until October 20, allowing him to take one trip of not more than six days to the Soviet Union.53 Questions have been raised about the speed with which the visa was issued. Summers says, “Oswald’s easy access had encouraged the belief that the Soviets were expecting him.”54 According to Nosenko, that speculation shows no understanding of how the Soviet tourist system worked. Nosenko should know, since he was deputy chief of the KGB’s Tourist Division in the Second Chief Directorate. Thousands of tourist applications were processed annually, and only a cursory review was given the forms, with the names checked against a security watch list. Also, the Soviet consul in Helsinki, Gregory Golub, had the authority to give Americans an instant visa if he was convinced the tourist was “all right.”55
In Oswald’s case, he was nineteen years old, did not list his Marine service or any current employer, and said he was a student traveler.56 “There was nothing of interest on his visa application,” remembers Nosenko.57 It was routinely approved, and since Helsinki was not as busy as London, Paris, or other major European capitals, its visa processing was quick. Two days was well within the ordinary time for that consulate.58
Oswald arrived in Moscow on October 16. He was taken by an Intourist representative to the Hotel Berlin.59 Since the KGB had no inkling that he was anything but a student visitor, it had absolutely no interest in him until his Intourist guide, Rima Shirokova, informed them that, on his second day in Moscow, Oswald had told her he wanted to defect and become a Soviet citizen.
Oswald’s defection to Russia seemed so well planned that some refuse to believe he accomplished it by himself. Garrison puts the word defection in quotation marks and Jim Marrs says Oswald was a “fake defector.” But in fact Oswald had carefully planned for his defection. His disciplined savings from his Marine Corps salary, maneuvers for an early discharge, and rudimentary study of the Russian language all suggest long-term preparation. He confirmed this after his arrival in Moscow, writing to his brother, Robert, that he had thought of defecting for over a year.60 To a reporter in Moscow, Aline Mosby, he admitted even longer: “For two years I’ve had it in my mind, don’t form any attachments, because I knew I was going away. I was planning to divest myself of everything to do with the United States.”61
He boasted of his reasons for defecting, telling his brother that Communism was the wave of the future: “Look at a world map! America is a dieing country, I do not wish to be a part of it, nor do I ever again wish to be used as a tool in its military aggressions.”62 Aline Mosby and another correspondent in Russia, Priscilla Johnson, were both impressed that his reasons were strictly ideological, and Johnson found his commitment to Communism “extraordinary” in light of his age.63 Mosby remembered that as he spoke of Das Kapital, “his eyes shone like those of a religious enthusiast.”64 For two hours he lectured her that “capitalism has passed its peak,” that “the Soviet Union has always been my ideal, as the bulwark of communism,” and that he was sick of the American “hysteria … hating communists or niggers.”65
“He appeared totally disinterested in anything but himself,” Mosby recalled. “He talked almost non-stop like the type of semi-educated person of little experience who clutches what he regards as some sort of unique truth.”66
His Intourist guide, Shirokova, was instructed to assist Oswald in his dealings with the government and to help him draft a letter to the Supreme Soviet formally requesting citizenship.67 October 18, two days after he arrived in Russia, was his twentieth birthday. Shirokova gave him Dostoevski’s The Idiot and inscribed it: “Dear Lee, Great Congratulations! Let all your dreams come true!”68
One of Nosenko’s subordinates, Major Rastrusin, prepared a small file, including statements about Oswald from the Intourist and hotel informants.69 From that moment Nosenko took charge of the matter. Although Oswald had declared his intention to defect, Nosenko is adamant the KGB did not interrogate him. Summers charges that “is transparent nonsense.” Garrison said, “The newcomer [Oswald] underwent extensive interrogation, although when, where, and under what circumstances have never been revealed.”70
“Not true,” insists Nosenko. “The KGB was not at all interested in him. I cannot emphasize that enough—absolutely no interest.”71 But what of Oswald’s Marine background and his service at Atsugi, where the U-2 spy plane was based? The Soviets had made the U-2 a top priority and finally shot one down on May 1, 1960, less than seven months after Oswald’s arrival. “People who raise this point do not understand intelligence work,” he says. “I am surprised that such a big deal is made of the fact that he was a Marine. Even the House Select Committee kept saying to me, ‘But he was a Marine—that must have interested the KGB.’ I was astonished at their naiveté. So what is the big deal that he was in the Marines? First, he wasn’t in the Marines any longer, but even if he had come to us in a uniform, we still would have had no interest. What was he in the Marine Corps—a major, a captain, a colonel? We had better information already coming from KGB sources than he could ever give us.
“If he had been a Marine guard at the U.S. embassy, then we would have been very interested. But that wasn’t the case with Oswald.
“As for Atsugi, we didn’t know he had been based there. The media section of the KGB would have seen Oswald’s public interviews, but they would not necessarily have transferred that information to us. Even if we knew about Atsugi, it is unlikely we would have spoken to him. Our intelligence on the U-2 was good and had been for some time.”72 The Soviets already had considerable knowledge about the plane. They had often tracked its path, speed, and altitude. Intelligence experts on the U-2 concur that Oswald could not have contributed to its eventual downing, as some have suggested.73
Though Oswald was not interrogated in depth, he was questioned by KGB informants, including Shirokova. On October 19, he was interviewed by Radio Moscow correspondent Lev Setyayev. While the purported reason was to record Oswald’s impressions as a tourist for broadcast overseas, Setyayev was also an informant for the KGB.74 Based on the information it received, Nosenko’s department vetoed Oswald’s request for citizenship. “We had no reason to let him stay,” remembers Nosenko. “Soviet citizenship was not something lightly given out to foreigners and there was certainly no reason to make an exception for Oswald.
“We did not have many defectors that wanted to live in Russia.* We were realistic about living conditions in Russia. [Robert] Webster, another defector who had arrived shortly before Oswald, was happy for three or four months, but then he missed the conveniences of home and wanted to go back to America. It was an unusual person who decided to defect as a civilian to Russia. And, of course, we could never totally dismiss the idea that any of these defectors might be a provocation from American intelligence. In the case of Oswald, we simply didn’t want him and thought it best to send him home.”
On October 21, Oswald was called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There was only one day left on his six-day visa. The official was discouraging about his chance for obtaining citizenship but said he would check on extending his visa. Later that afternoon, Oswald’s citizenship request was officially denied and he was told he must leave Moscow within two hours.75
Nosenko later learned the details of what happened next. “His Intourist guide went to the Berlin Hotel to pick him up. He was late by ten minutes, and then by twenty minutes, so she went to the duty clerk on his floor. † The clerk did not have his key, which meant he was still in the room. She got the manager of the hotel and told him she was worried about Oswald, and together they went to his room. They knocked and called his name and received no answer. When they entered the room [with an extra key], they found Oswald with his wrist cut and blood all over.”76
In his diary, Oswald wrote what happened after he received the news that his citizenship request was rejected: “I am stunned.… Eve. 6.00 Recive word from police official. I must leave country tonight at. 8.00 P.M. as visa expirs. I am shocked!! My dreams! I retire to my room. I have $100 left. I have waited for 2 year to be accepted. My fondes dreams are shattered because of a petty offial; because of bad planning I planned too much! 7:00 P.M. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain. Than slash my left wrist. Than plaug wrist into bathtub of hot water. I think ‘when Rimma comes at 8. to find me dead it wil be a great shock. somewhere, a violin plays, as I wacth my life whirl away. I think to myself. ‘how easy to die’ and ‘a sweet death, (to violins).”77*
Oswald was rushed by ambulance to nearby Botkinskaya Hospital. Blood transfusions stabilized him. Nosenko reports: “When Oswald regained consciousness, he was asked why he did it. He said, ‘I’m not leaving here.’”78 Oswald’s KGB file reveals that a note written in English was discovered on the table near his bed in his hotel room. It read: “Did I come here just to find death? I love life.”79
Prompted by his suicide attempt, the KGB ordered a mental evaluation. Oswald was transferred to a psychiatric ward at Botkinskaya, where he was kept for three days.80 “We had two psychiatrists, neither of whom was a KGB doctor, examine him,” recalls Nosenko. “One was on the Botkin staff and the other came in from outside. I read their reports. Both concluded he was ‘mentally unstable.’ It made us feel one hundred percent that he should be avoided at all costs.” A transcript, maintained in the KGB files, of a conversation with the doctor who sewed up Oswald’s slashed wrist indicated that he was capable of more irrational acts.81
The KGB certainly knew it was right not to grant Oswald citizenship, but now it was faced with the difficult decision of what to do with him. There were two choices—to force him onto a plane for coerced deportation, or allow him to stay temporarily without granting him citizenship. Oswald’s timing could not have been better.
“The Foreign Ministry decision on what to do with Oswald was really influenced by the larger political climate,” says Nosenko. On September 26 and 27, when Oswald had traveled to Europe for his defection, President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev were meeting in the Maryland woods in what became known as “the spirit of Camp David.” After Khrushchev’s return, the Soviets were acutely aware of how the treatment of visiting Americans might affect the new relationship between the countries. Because of his suicide attempt, Oswald gained the attention of the USSR’s leaders. His KGB file shows that senior Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan personally gave orders that Oswald’s request for asylum be given careful consideration. “After years of cold relations between the superpowers, they were just starting to warm up,” recalls Nosenko. “We didn’t want to do anything to hurt this new atmosphere or to give a pretext to those who wanted to ruin better relations. By telling Oswald he had to leave, he was so unstable he might try and succeed in killing himself. Then we would be criticized for a KGB murder of an American tourist. If we forced him onto a plane for deportation, there was still the image of a student being manhandled by the Soviet security forces. Considering the options, we decided to let him stay. He seemed harmless enough. We could decide where he worked and lived, and maintain surveillance over him to ensure he did not cause any trouble or was not an American sleeper agent.”82
Oswald was released from Botkinskaya Hospital on October 28, and Shirokova checked him into a new hotel, the Metropole.83 Nosenko’s department took more than two months to decide finally what to do with him. Meanwhile, Oswald continued to try to impress his new hosts with his zeal for the Russian system and his distaste for America. On Saturday, October 31, after three days in which he stayed in his hotel room waiting futilely for word from Soviet officials, he stormed into the American embassy and tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He declared he was a Marxist, tossed his passport across the consul’s desk, and said he intended to give the Soviets all the information he had acquired as a Marine radar operator.84 American consul Richard Snyder was still smarting from a recent would-be defector who had quickly changed his mind afterward.85 Snyder knew Oswald’s act would be irrevocable, and thought he was too young at twenty to make such a permanent decision. He put him off by claiming it was too late in the day and the paperwork could not be finished in time. Oswald left in a huff. Although Snyder told him to return Monday to finish the revocation, he did not. He was apparently satisfied that his bravado had adequately impressed the Soviets, and wrote in his diary that he was “elated” by his scene at the embassy.86
In the belief his mail might be read by the Soviets, Oswald was explicit in denouncing the U.S. when writing to his family. He told his brother, Robert, that the United States was “a country I hate,”87 and that he would like to “see the present capitalist government of the U.S. overthrown.”88 He condemned “American propaganda” and a government based on economic exploitation and war, and bragged “I fight for communism” (emphasis in original).89 He warned his brother: “In the event of war I would kill any american who put a uniform in defense of the american government—any american—”(emphasis in original).90*
His diatribes against America and praise for the Russian system did not impress the KGB. While Oswald ended the year in Moscow spending most of his time studying Russian in his hotel room, the KGB decided his fate.91 On January 4, 1960, he was summoned to the passport office and given an identity document for stateless persons, No. 311479.92 He was told he was being immediately relocated to Minsk, an industrial city of five hundred thousand people, 450 miles southwest of Moscow. “It wasn’t Moscow, of course, but it was a provincial capital and not a little farming village,” says Nosenko.
The local KGB in Minsk was ordered to monitor Oswald once he arrived there. “Surveillance was typical in the case of any foreigner who was allowed to live in Russia at that time,” Nosenko recalls. “The Minsk KGB was prohibited from any ‘active surveillance’ of Oswald. They could not detain or arrest him, blackmail him, or attempt to recruit him without the permission of the chief of the Second Directorate, as well as the chairman of the KGB. Under no conditions could any officer establish an operative relationship with Oswald. They could not approach him except in the course of their surveillance. In those days no KGB agent would think of violating an order from Moscow. It meant the end of your career.”93
While the Minsk KGB kept Oswald under detailed surveillance and his file grew, Nosenko, who had been transferred to another department, lost track of the Marine defector. He thought he had heard the last of Lee Harvey Oswald. Then on Friday, November 22, 1963, he was working late at KGB headquarters at Dzerzhinsky Square when somebody ran in with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. Turning on the radio, Nosenko and several other agents monitored the reports until the confirmation of the President’s death. “We were all shocked,” he recalls. “The Russian people truly liked Kennedy. He was just starting to warm up relations. It was not good news.”
But if Nosenko was shocked by the assassination, his biggest surprise was yet to come. “Soon they announced that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.” According to Nosenko, that news sent shock waves through the KGB and the Kremlin. What would be made of the fact that Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for nearly three years? “Immediately, I remembered him,” says Nosenko. “Then, in minutes, General Gribanov, the section chief, called me and asked me to contact the KGB in Minsk and get the entire file to Moscow by military plane. Gribanov also told me to find out if anyone in the Minsk KGB had any unauthorized relation with Oswald.”94
Nosenko telephoned the Minsk headquarters and had them retrieve the file and read him a summary sheet. He was initially relieved, because it appeared the local KGB had followed its orders of only conducting surveillance on Oswald. Within two hours, file 31451 arrived in Nosenko’s department.
“It consisted of five to six file folders, each about four to five inches thick,” he remembers.* “Together, they filled a suitcase. In the KGB, the first file is always the most important. The other files were just the ordinary reports of the local surveillance. But the first would show if there was any intelligence approach to Oswald. Not only the KGB, but also any contact by GRU [Soviet military intelligence], or even Cuban Intelligence, would be revealed in that file.”95
Nosenko became concerned when he noticed a line in the first file that the Minsk KGB had attempted “to influence Oswald in the right direction.”96 That greatly disturbed General Gribanov as well. Later, Nosenko was relieved to discover it referred to a lieutenant colonel in the MVD, the local militia—he was an uncle of Marina, the woman Oswald had married. † Marina’s uncle had contacted Oswald shortly before the couple departed for America, and warned him not to speak disparagingly of the Soviet Union upon his return to the U.S.97 Nosenko spent about an hour and a half with Oswald’s file, then several agents from the First Department, the American section, came in and demanded the paperwork. “They were the most important department in the KGB,” according to Nosenko. “Gribanov knew they would write a better report for the government. There was no way we could refuse them. Before I could review those containing the routine surveillance on Oswald, the First Department had left with the files.”98
But not before Nosenko had reached a firm opinion about whether Oswald had any KGB connection. “Absolutely none,” he adamantly says. “The files were clear. The KGB didn’t want Oswald from day one.”99*
*The transliteration of names from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet used herein is the same system utilized by American intelligence and regarded as academically correct by the CIA’s Soviet Division. It results in spellings that are often different from popular ones.
*Because Alsop was a good friend of President Kennedy, the CIA’s assistant deputy director for plans ordered those references cut from the Nosenko interview tapes.
*Since Nosenko defected less than two months after the assassination, some believe the two events are connected. Nosenko is adamant that defection was his goal since 1962 but that 1964 was his first opportunity. Disarmament negotiations were postponed twice in 1963. “If there had been a meeting as scheduled in the spring of 1963, I would have defected then, six months before the assassination,” he says. “I had always planned to defect in 1963.”
† In this book, when a person is quoted in the present tense, it indicates that the statement was obtained during an interview by the author. The past tense is used for quotations from other sources.
‡ Later defectors revealed that Gribanov was dismissed after Nosenko’s defection and ended his life as a drunk, wandering Moscow’s bars with a KGB handler.
*Because he was deprived of dental care for nearly two years, he later suffered severe gum disease, which led to the loss of most of his teeth.
*Every Soviet defector to the U.S. who was in a position to know about the Nosenko case confirmed his bona fides. Of the fifteen who have confirmed Nosenko, the following are considered by CIA officials to be the ten most important (their year of defection is in parentheses): Yuriy Loginov (1961); Igor Kochnov (1966); Oleg Lyalin (1971); Rudolf Herrmann (1980); Ilya Dzhirkvelov (1980); Vladimir Kuzichkin (1984); Viktor Gundarev (1985); Vitaliy Yurchenko (1985); Ivan Bogattyy (1985); and Oleg Gordievskiy (1985).
† The KGB had no intention of returning Nosenko to Russia Plans had been preapproved to liquidate him once he was found.
*The author tried to obtain a comment from Epstein regarding Nosenko’s accusation, but Epstein never returned the author’s telephone calls.
†In the summer of 1992, the chairman of the Belorus KGB, Eduard Shirkovskiy, denied reports that the Oswald file was available to the highest bidder, and claimed he had been offered, and rejected, $50 million for it. Yet by the fall the KGB had reportedly reached an arrangement (the terms undisclosed) with Norman Mailer for access to the file.
*Records show that fourteen Americans defected to Communist countries from 1958 through 1960. Two went to China, one to East Germany, and the remaining eleven to Russia, four of those with their wives.
†Each floor at the main Soviet tourist hotels had a clerk, termed the dezhurnaya. When a tourist left his room, he was required to give the key to the clerk for safekeeping. Nosenko says all such clerks were KGB informants.
*Oswald calls the document his Historic Diary, and it is an account of his time in Russia There is not an entry for each day, and sometimes a single entry will cover a month or more. The early entries seem to be written after the events described, but the later ones, reflecting life in Minsk, appear contemporaneous. Robert Groden, in High Treason, declares the diary “clearly a fake.” He maintains the spelling is too good to belong to Oswald, a terrible speller. But the diary is replete with misspellings and Oswald’s trademark transpositions. Handwriting experts used by both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee determined the diary was written by Oswald.
*Despite his attempt to renounce his citizenship and his threat to tell the Soviets about U.S. military secrets, the CIA did not open a file on Oswald, termed a 201, until December 9, 1960, almost a year after his defection. It was created in response to a State Department request about defectors in general. Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone call the 201 a personnel file and claims it proves Oswald was a CIA employee. But a 201 is actually opened on anyone in whom the CIA takes interest. That there was no Agency file on Oswald prior to December 1960 is further evidence he had no connection to U.S. intelligence through the time of his defection to Russia.
The FBI, on the other hand, had started a file in November 1959, a month after Oswald’s defection, and the Marine Corps had reversed his honorable discharge to undesirable a year after he left the service.
*Nosenko’s memory on the files is good. KGB case No. 31451 actually consists of five thick volumes and a thin folder tied together with shoelaces.
†Marina lived with her aunt and uncle before marrying Oswald. Some exaggerate her uncle’s position to suggest an intelligence connection for either Marina or Lee. Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone write that Marina’s uncle, “it is believed, [was] with the KGB.” Nosenko dismisses the suggestion. “He was MVD,” he says. “It’s like being a local policeman, nothing more. He was completely unimportant.”
*While Nosenko concluded that Soviet intelligence had no relationship with Oswald, Vladimir Semichastny, then chairman of the KGB, later reached a conclusion as to whether Oswald worked for American intelligence. “Would the FBI or CIA really use such a pathetic person to work against their archenemy?” asked Semichastny. “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their work and what they were capable of. It was clear Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent, for the U.S. secret services, either the CIA or the FBI” (“Inside the KGB,” NBC, May 25, 1993).