Was Yuri Nosenko a KGB mole?
A readeader asks:
Do you still believe Nosenko was a true defector, Jeff?
Have you read Tennent H. Bagley’s “Spy Wars,” or even his 35-page PDF “Ghosts of the Spy Wars”?
Yes, I did read Bagley’s Spy Wars. I also interviewed him. And yes, I do believe Nosenko was a true defector.
I think Bagley was wrong, for two reasons: lack of a plausible suspect and lack of damage to CIA operations.
Remember Angleton’s theory that Nosenko was a dispatched defector is inextricably bound up in the theory that Nosenko was dispatched to protect a mole already working inside the CIA as of January 1964. So the reader’s question is really two, was Nosenko a mole? And, if so, who was he protecting?
As I asked in THE GHOST
if there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?
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