Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (Russian: Юрий Иванович Носенко; October 30, 1927 – August 23, 2008)[1] was a putative KGB officer who allegedly defected to the United States in 1964.
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.
In late May 1962 (according to Bagley, though some sources suggest early June), Nosenko contacted the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, about two months after accompanying an arms-control delegation to the city as its ostensible security officer.
He met one-on-one with Bagley at a Geneva safe house and offered his services to the CIA in exchange for approximately $250 worth of Swiss francs.
He explained that he had spent the money on "wine, women, and song" and needed to replenish it, as it was an unauthorized expenditure of KGB funds that he would soon have to account for with his superiors.
During the second meeting, Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov had been caught due to superior KGB surveillance in Moscow.
Nosenko returned to Moscow with the delegation in mid-June,[6] while Bagley and Kisevalter flew separately to CIA Headquarters—each carrying copies of the tape recordings and each other's notes.
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 a half years, Nosenko once again accompanied the delegation to Geneva and reestablished contact with Bagley and Kisevalter.
Believing his life to be in danger, he expressed his urgent desire to defect to the United States immediately, despite knowing it would mean leaving his wife and daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves.
Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had no involvement with Oswald during his time in the USSR and had not even interviewed the former Marine radar operator, as he was deemed "abnormal."
He realized that everything Nosenko had told Kisevalter and himself in Geneva about specific Soviet penetrations of NATO intelligence services either contradicted or minimized what Golitsyn had already revealed to Angleton.
According to Bagley, Polyakov did begin spying for the CIA after leaving his post at the U.N. in New York City and being reassigned to Burma, Moscow, and India.
Nosenko underwent three polygraph exams administered by the CIA: two by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division (in 1964 and 1966), and one by Bruce Solie of the Office of Security in 1968.
For example: When the interrogations by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division failed to "break" Nosenko over a period of three years, his case was transferred to Bruce Solie of the Office of Security.
Solie was able to effectively clear Nosenko, secure his release from confinement, have him reimbursed for his troubles, and eventually arrange for him to be hired by the Agency to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.
As a result, he was sent to the U.S. to testify before the Warren Commission, claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy who had lived in the Soviet Union for two and a half years, was not a KGB agent.
[12] The KGB also made significant efforts to discredit Golitsyn by spreading disinformation, including claims that he was involved in illegal smuggling operations.
[13] In 2013, Bagley published another book in which he revealed details he had gathered by comparing notes with Sergey Kondrashev, the head of disinformation operations for the KGB's First Chief Directorate.
[14] Ever since Bagley read Golitsyn's file at CIA headquarters in mid-June 1962, he suspected that Nosenko was a false defector, and he was pleased to have his suspicions confirmed by Kondrashev.
He claimed that high-tech KGB surveillance had overheard U.S. Assistant Naval Attaché Leo J. Dulacki and his Indonesian counterpart discussing this mysterious person.
This suggested to Bagley, as he noted in his book Spy Wars, that the KGB had become aware of Penkovsky's treason within a couple of weeks of his recruitment by the CIA and MI6.
The other main lesson to be learned is that although counterintelligence analysis necessarily involves the making of hypotheses, we must at all times treat them as what they are, and not act on them until they have been objectively tested in an impartial manner.
Bagley was adamant that Nosenko had not made this claim in 1962 but had instead stated that his section had monitored Abidian and found "nothing but a pair of girl's panties in his bedroom."
Furthermore, Nosenko had told Bagley and Kisevalter in 1962 that he had transferred out of the American Embassy section of the KGB at the end of 1961, which, if true, would have meant he no longer had access to the reports on the dead-drop monitoring that would have been generated after that time.
This perplexing contradiction is discussed by authors Jeremy Duns and David Wise in their respective books Dead Drop and Mole Hunt.