Books
Cold War Intrigue
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley ISBN 978-0300121988This fascinating book proved great medicine while we were laid up with a cold over the recent holidays. The author was a counterintelligence officer at CIA in the 1950s and 60s, eventually rising to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Russia ("SR") Division and Division Deputy Director. While the book looks into many historical Tsarist and Soviet intel operations, the prime focus is on the case of a notorious KGB Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko which the author was directly involved. The author also spends considerable time on the efforts (cover up?) by the CIA and others to rehabilitate Nosenko's bona fides as a genuine and valuable defector.
The bottom line is this - if you take the author at his word concerning the interviews and documents he was involved in, as well as those of others, there is no way one can see Nosenko as anything but a false defector. However, the question in my mind is why they would willingly send someone so blatantly unprepared - certainly they thought better of CIA than that? I have to wonder if the actual decision to 'defect' was in fact Nosenko's - he was a drunk and womanizer and going no where fast at KGB. His 1962 Geneva trip was probably a real KGB operation, but the subsequent trip could have seen Nosenko go off reservation figuring he had a ticket to a better life (ultimately) in the US if he defected rather than work in place as a 'double' as per KGB orders. This would have put KGB in quite the difficult situation.
Anyone interested in intelligence operations, especially those of the cold war period should read this book. We can only hope now that Nosenko is dead that the CIA will release *all* the files, at least those that were not destroyed in the late 1960s.
