Yuri Nosenko

Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (Юрий Иванович Носенко; October 30, 1927 – August 23, 2008) was a putative KGB officer who ostensibly defected to the United States in 1964.

Controversy arose as to whether or not he was a KGB "plant," and he was held in detention by the CIA for over three years before he was finally deemed a true defector.

After his release he became an American citizen and worked as a consultant and a lecturer for the CIA.

Nosenko was allegedly born in Nikolaev, Ukrainian SSR (now Mykolaiv, Ukraine).

His alleged father, Ivan Nosenko, was USSR Minister of Shipbuilding from 1939 until his death in 1956.

During the Second World War, Nosenko allegedly attended naval preparatory school, intending on a career in shipbuilding, like his father.

After the war, he allegedly attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), graduating in 1950.

On graduation he allegedly served in Naval Intelligence until he allegedly transferred to the KGB in 1953.

In the KGB, he allegedly worked primarily in the Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), which was responsible for counterintelligence and internal security.

The below annotated passage is taken verbatim from a declassified CIA document referencing Nosenko's defection and subsequent treatment.

Note: The above official CIA account by the Office of Security differs markedly from the one given by Nosenko's case officer from mid-June 1962 to late-October 1967, Tennent H. Bagley.

In late May 1962 (according to Bagley; some say early June), Nosenko contacted the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, about two months after he had accompanied an arms-control delegation to that city as the delegation's ostensible security officer.

Nosenko met one-on-one with Bagley in a Geneva "safe house," and offered his services to the CIA in exchange for about $250 worth of Swiss francs that he had spent on "wine, women and song" and which he needed to replenish as it represented an unauthorized expenditure of KGB funds which he would soon have to account for to his superiors.

He told Bagley that he was a major in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), that until recently he had been the deputy chief of the KGB department operating against the American Embassy in Moscow, and that he was now the head of the department that monitored and attempted to recruit American and British tourists in the USSR.

Nosenko provided some information to Bagley that could only be known by someone connected to the KGB, and Bagley promised to give him the money he requested at the next meeting.

Nosenko volunteered to Bagley that he didn't want to leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow, and that he would therefore never leave the USSR to live in the West.

He promised, however, to re-contact the CIA whenever he was permitted to travel outside the USSR in the future, and warned Bagley that he didn't want to be contacted inside the USSR.

As Nosenko was leaving, he mentioned that he knew how the CIA's spy, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, had been caught, but said that he didn't have enough time at the moment to tell Bagley the details and would fill him in "next time."

Nosenko, who spoke English, met one-on-one with Russian-understanding Bagley during this first meeting, and with Bagley and Russia-born George Kisevalter during the remaining four meetings.

During the second one, he told Bagley and Kisevalter that Popov was caught due to superior KGB surveillance in Moscow when an American diplomat, George Winters, had been seen mailing a letter to him.

Nosenko returned to Moscow with the delegation in mid-June, and Bagley and Kisevalter flew to Headquarters on separate planes—each carrying copies of the tape recordings and copies of each other's notes.

"Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, an officer of the KGB, defected to a representative (Tennent H. Bagley) of this Agency in Geneva, Switzerland, on 4 February 1964. The responsibility for his exploitation was assigned to the then SR [Soviet Russia] Division of the Clandestine Service and he was brought to this country on 12 February 1964. After initial interrogation by representatives of the SR Division, he was moved to a safehouse in Clinton, Maryland, from 4 April 1964 where he was confined and interrogated until 13 August 1965 when he was moved to a specially constructed 'jail' in a remote wooded area at [redacted] The SR Division was convinced that he was a dispatched agent but even after a long period of hostile interrogation was unable to prove their contention and he was confined at [redacted] in an effort to convince him to 'confess.'

This Office [of Security], together with the Office of General Counsel became increasingly concerned with the illegality of the Agency's position in handling a defector under these conditions for such a long period of time.

In late January 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a former Marine who had lived in the USSR for two-and-one-half years, Nosenko once again accompanied the delegation to Geneva and re-contacted Bagley and Kisevalter.

He shocked Bagley and Kisevalter by telling them he had been the case officer of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR.

A few days later, he nervously told them he had received a telegram from Moscow ordering him to return immediately, that he took this as an indication that the Kremlin was "on to" his spying for the CIA, and that he therefore wanted to physically defect to the U.S. right away, even though it meant he'd be leaving his wife and daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves.

Regarding the recall telegram Nosenko claimed to have received from KGB headquarters, the CIA was later able to determine that no such missive had been sent, and Nosenko subsequently admitted making the story up in order to persuade the CIA to accept his request to physically defect to the U.S.

Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had had nothing to do with Oswald in the USSR, and that it hadn't even interviewed the former Marine radar operator because he seemed "abnormal."

After Nosenko was allowed to physically defect to the U.S., Richard Helms, realizing that Nosenko was probably a false defector, convinced Earl Warren to not allow Nosenko to testify to the Warren Commission, which at that time was investigating the assassination.

By mid-1964, CIA's Soviet Bloc Division (formerly called the Soviet Russia Division) strongly suspected that Nosenko was a KGB plant for several reasons, including the fact that he had lied twice about his rank (and had even provided an official KGB document that backed up his second lie), and because Anatoliy Golitsyn's warning that the KGB would soon send someone like Nosenko to discredit him seemed to Bagley and James Angleton to have been fulfilled when the former read Golitsyn's thick file at CIA headquarters and realized that everything Nosenko had volunteered to Kisevalter and himself in Geneva a week earlier about specific Soviet penetrations of NATO countries' intelligence services had contradicted or minimized what Golitsyn had already told Angleton.

This seemed especially suspicious given the fact that Golitsyn and Nosenko had been in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.

About a month after Nosenko arrived in the U.S., he was taken by Bagley on a two-week vacation to Hawaii, and when they returned to Washington, Nosenko, who had not cooperated with the CIA's interviewers up to that point, was detained in a Washington-area "safe house," administered a polygraph exam, subjected to interrogations, and from 1965 to 1967 was subjected to increasingly harsh interrogations and conditions, including being held in a purpose-built, bunker-like safe house in an operation that was approved by CIA Director John A. McCone.

Although Nosenko fell into a trance-like state and came close to "breaking" at one point, he never did.

Strong representations were made to the Director (Mr. Helms) by this Office, the Office of General Counsel, and the Legislative Liaison Counsel, and on 27 October 1967, the responsibility for Nosenko's further handling was transferred to [possible KGB 'mole' Bruce Solie in] the Office of Security under the direction of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, then Admiral Rufus Taylor.

Nosenko was moved to a comfortable safehouse in the Washington area and was interviewed under friendly, sympathetic conditions by his Security [Office] Case Officer, Mr. Solie, for more than a year.

It soon became apparent that Nosenko was bona fide and he was moved to more comfortable surroundings with considerable freedom of independent movement and has continued to cooperate fully with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and this Office since that time.

He has proven to be the most valuable and economical defector this Agency has ever had and leads which were ignored by the SR Division were explored and have resulted in the arrest and prosecution [redacted] He currently is living under an alias; secured a divorce from his Russian wife and remarried an American citizen.

He is happy, relaxed, and appreciative of the treatment accorded him and states 'while I regret my three years of incarceration, I have no bitterness and now understand how it could happen.'"

In his 1978 HSCA testimony, his 2007 book, "Spy Wars," and his 2014 follow-up PDF, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars", Bagley said that Nosenko, refusing to leave his beloved wife and two daughters behind in Moscow, "defected in place" to the CIA in late May, 1962, and that none of the leads Nosenko provided to the CIA were to Soviet assets who "had current access to NATO governmental secrets, [were] actively cooperating [with Soviet intelligence] at the time, and had previously been unsuspected by Western counterintelligence agencies."

Nosenko did, however, testify to the HSCA in 1978, but the members of the commission found him to be un-credible.