Customer Reviews

Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games

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In 1962 in Geneva a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko contacted the CIA to supply them with information about KGB operations, before returning to the Soviet Union. In the beginning of 1964, Nosenko unexpectedly surfaced again in the West and re-contacted the CIA. This time he told the Americans that he had had charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had assassinated John F. Kennedy only a couple of months before. This time, Nosenko wished to remain in the West. With bait like first-hand knowledge of the Oswald file, who could resist? But more than four decades later, the basic question remains a matter of controversy: Was Yuri Nosenko a genuine defector or was he a KGB plant?

Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the author of the present book, was the first CIA case officer to handle Nosenko and in the early and mid-Sixties he participated in intense interrogations and investigations of the supposed defector. And forty years later, Bagley remains convinced that Nosenko was a fraud, even though the official position of the CIA for many years has been that the man was a genuine defector. If what Bagley states in "Spy Wars" about Nosenko's claims is true, then the only reasonable conclusion would seem to be that Nosenko was indeed a liar (and a not particularly good liar) but, as Bagley points out, the CIA (and many other organizations) is willing to deceive itself when the alternative is painful or embarrassing (and if Nosenko was indeed accepted to be a false defector, that conclusion would be very painful and embarrassing for the CIA which has publically embraced the former Soviet officer).

There seem to be three possible general conclusions to be drawn about Nosenko: (1) he was a genuine defector whose story became confused only because of the stress of the situation (a conclusion difficult to accept in light of Bagley's revelations); (2) he was a genuine, but low-level defector who lied to make himself appear to be a much bigger fish, or (3) Nosenko's "defection" was a Soviet disinformation ploy, perhaps to protect moles and successful KGB penetrations of American cypher traffic. Bagley clearly favors the third conclusion and in essence provides an explanation of why this supposed defector appeared to be ill-prepared to successfully lie about many crucial areas. Bagley evidently believes that Nosenko was a low-level KGB operative (perhaps with a criminal background) who was being prepared for a false defection to cover real Soviet espionage successes when in the wake of the JFK Assassination, the KGB was forced to quickly revise Nosenko's story and dispatch him again to the West with "proof" that Oswald had no ties to the KGB (by the way, Bagley does not contend that the KGB played any role in the JFK Assassination, only that the Nosenko affair provided them with a temptizingly convenient way of placing a greater distance between themselves and the killing).

I have been interested in the Nosenko case for about thirty years, and had supposed that by now it had been resolved (and that in the end Nosenko had proved genuine). Bagley's book instead proves that the controversy goes on (and provides a powerful voice labeling Nosenko a fraud).

Espionage and counterintelligence have been called "a wilderness of mirrors" and Bagley's "Spy Wars" shows just how baffling and fascinating that wilderness can be.

In this well written and fast-paced book Bagley, while narrating a
mystery-filled spy case, deals with a timely question: how and why
intelligence and counterintelligence information can be suppressed and
distorted to serve political or other agendas, to the detriment of the
national interest. It serves as a warning to decision makers of the
pitfalls of wishful thinking and self protection.

The book uses the case of the Soviet KGB defector Yuri Nosenko to unveil
a fascinating, hidden world of Soviet deception. In this still
unresolved affair the CIA finally decided that Nosenko was a genuine
defector and served the interests of the United States. This position,
finally adopted by the Agency's "cool heads." used false information
that is exposed in this book. Bagley gives solid reasons to think the
position is wrong and that the KGB sent Nosenko to CIA as a provocateur.
Most important, he reveals for the first time what lay behind this KGB
deception game: moles in CIA and even more dangerous, Soviet breaking of
American secret ciphers--never uncovered to this day..

The Nosenko case developed into a gigantic and sometimes rather dirty
fight within the CIA. In the end the "cool heads" prevailed. William
Colby, after becoming CIA Director, fired the counterintelligence staff
chief James Angleton and closed the debate. But did it really end? After
the Cold War Bagley went out on his own and turned up new evidence from
KGB veterans, and his carefully researched and utterly convincing book
is likely to reopen the issue.

This is an important historical document which will be widely read and
long debated.

I am a former counterintelligence officer and subject to the vestiges of the professional parinoia that is one of the occupational hazards of the field. That said, the Nosenko case, so well discribed by Mr. Bagley, still stinks. The CIA is a government bureaucracy that is even more inclined to labor under the burden of "group-think" than the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other large governmental or corporate organization. That is why the managment of the CIA wants everybody on board with the party line: Nosenko is the McCoy, the real deal.
Nosenko was a plant. The incriminating information that he revealed came before he was sequestered in Virginia. Mr. Bagley claims that the CIA Soviet Bloc (SB) branch had a legal go-ahead from high officials in the administration, the Atty. Gen. for example,to keep Nosenko under wraps. The rehabilitation of Nosenko had more to do with covering up ineptitude than any evidence that would clear up questions about Nosenko's validity. In Legacy of Ashes the author points out that many spies, traitors and moles were revealed by Nosenko. Mr. Bagely refutes this. Who were they, the exposed? Surely now someone can come forward with these names. Nosenko is an adventurer who got to play on the big stage. His efforts to convice the CIA that the communist (Oswald) that shot JFK was not working for, with or had any connection with the chief organ of the Soviet communist party whatsoever.
The House Committee on Assasinations was convinced that Nosenko was lying. This is not to say that there was any connection to the murder but it is safe to say that the Soviets truly wanted the US to believe that there was none.
During his extensive interviews, Nosenko was asked simple questions: what elevator did you take to your floor, how were secretaries assigned,what is your KGB rank, what did they serve in the lunch room and other seemingly mundane quesions? He could not provide answers. I can still remember the layout of each office that I occupied and that was over 30 years ago. Nosenko was poorly briefed. The KGB hoped that we would focus on the things that they wanted us to know not the trivia that would make or break Nosenko's bona fides. Nobody is perfect.
It is the simple things that trip you up when you lie.
One thing that Mr. Bagely missed when he talked about other, non-Soviet, operations was that during the deception operation being run against the Germans in WW 2 leading up to the Normandy landings, the Brits dropped agents into occupied France that they knew would be captured and tortured. They had been given scraps of information that conformed to what the German high command wanted to believe: the invasion would be north of the Seine near Calais. That, gentle reader, is cold. So, it is no great reach to suspect the Soviets from doing the same kind of thing.
One way to deal with this would be to have aspiring CIA officers listen to a debate on the Nosenko issue, having both sides make presentations and then let the little darlings think for themselves. That is what we pay them to do, after all: THINK.
Superspy

This outstanding work by a key figure at the center of the Nosenko-Golitsyn-Angleton controversy, and alongside Edward Jay Espstein's work (which was based in part on conversations with Angleton before the latter's death), finally gives us the inside story of the dual defectors, and supplies a long-overdue corrective to the work of Mangold and Wise in their early-1990s biographies of Angleton. The truths set forth by Bagaley shoud be incorporated into the standard history of Cold War counter-espionage as well as the JFK assasination.

While this book is likely not written for the general public , in my opinion it is one of the most important books written in the past few years. I also am a former intelligence officer . I had a number of dealings with James Angleton during my 20 plus years of service. The numermous allegations that Angleton was paranoid constituted total nonsense. The fact that Pete Bagley and Jim Angleton who served the the people of america so honorably were so denigrated not only by the media but in some cases by their former collegues is shameful . The facts that Mr. Bagley has documented in this book should , in my opinion , be the basis for a blue ribbon commission to ascertain the true state of affairs. The American public and for that matter the world public needs to know more about assassination as a tool of statecraft as practiced by the Soviet Union's KGB .

This is the second book of this sort that I felt was a "settling old scores" book. The author writes very well, and has an extraordinary background in spycraft. He could certainly write a fascinating book about the history of intelligence in the Cold War. This book is a single subject book, and I should have read the description more carefully. The subject is Nosenko, and a limited range of activities that surrounded Nosenko, and much of the book is a 'case' or a 'proof' of exactly how the CIA failed to determine that Nosenko was a Soviet plant.

Despite the intense focus on Nosenko, the author has such a commanding grasp of Intelligence and Counter-intelligence that he cannot help but write an interesting book. His background information, anecdotes, and comments are excellent reading. The appendices are actually interesting reading, and more interesting than some of the main text.

If you are interested in Yuri Nosenko, and want to know how how the author feels (believes/knows) the CIA mishandled Nosenko, then this is the book for you. If you are hoping for a book that covers the broad topic of Spy Wars, then this is not that book, although it could have been.

Pete Bagley deserves to be heard on the topic of Nosenko, not least because he has been taken to task by other writers (Mangold, Wise) over it. Bagley was THERE when Nosenko "walked in" in 1962 and observed him first hand. Nobody doubts that, at that time, at the height of the cold war, SOMEBODY needed to be suspicious of Soviet walk-ins. Bagley first thought Nosenko was a good catch, but came to caution over the predicition by Anatoli Golitsyn that false defectors would follow him. The timing and circumstances of Nosenko's January 1964 defection, soon after John Kennedy's assassination, and the serendipity that he was uniquely positioned to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a KGB agent, certainly added to the suspicion. Nosenko clearly lied about some things, such as his rank and his recall to Moscow, and this created a cadre of "Fundamentalists" (including CIA's Bagley, Jim Angleton, Scotty Miler, Dave Murphy, FBI-CIA liaison Sam Papich, MI5's Arthur Martin and Peter Wright, to name a few) who have made this sort of perceived deception a life's work.

But not all those "in the know" accepted Bagley's analysis. Other CIA officers of equal credentials were skeptical, such as George Kisevalter, who handled Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovskiy, and a series of re-analyses by competent CI officers and others also came to contrary conclusions. I'm not sure if Bagley's offering is going to convince the skeptics, or allay the concerns over Nosenko's captivity. The latter certainly did not provide a warm invitation for later defectors.

It is striking that, in addition to the CIA and FBI people who think Nosenko was legit, a number of KGB defectors and others have vouched for him. During the cold war, it was Fedora and Top Hat. After the fall of the KGB, it was Nechiporenko and even Semichastny himself.

At this late date, it is hard to say if Bagley is right, even having given it his best shot. Maybe he is, and if he is, it raises troubling questions. I am still inclined to think that Nosenko was a real defector who thought his knowledge of the contents of the Oswald file were his meal ticket, and mixed with some booze and puffery, he tried to become a hero in America.

Bagley deserves to heard and read on the issue. I did find myself less secure in my beliefs after reading Spy Wars.

ADDENDUM: After further review, I wish to back off a bit on my review. After several close readings, I have to conclude that Bagley has not proven his case. While he found contradictions in Nosenko's interrogations, they do not necessarily lead to Bagley's conclusions. This book reads like conspiracy theory: It sounds convincing, but the proof falls short of conclusive. Are we really to believe that Nosenko, and by extension, a large number of other Soviet defectors, agents and post-Cold War KGB officers are STILL engaged in a coverup of Nosenko's true mission, after all these years? Do we disbelieve the long line of former KGB officers - including Semichastny, who led the KGB at the time - who insist that Nosenko was a blowhard, but a genuine one? Do we disbelieve the long line of CIA and FBI counterintelligence specialists - all as qualified as Bagley - who think Bagley is sincere, but just too hypersuspicious in this ancient case?

Some of his logic simply escapes me. Too complicated to explain here, virtually all US intelliegence pros are convinced that Dmitri Polyakov of the GRU was a real agent-in-place for the FBI. Bagley wants it both ways. He thinks Polyakov was a phony who metamorphosized into a real agent.

We NEED people like Bagley to think outside the envelope, to question the unquestionable, so that we are not fooled by a truly devious deception; but I would be a lot more comfortable with Bagley's thesis is he were less closed-minded to differing interpretations of these events. Professional disagreements sometimes die hard.

This book is still fascinating and worth reading. Is Bagley right? Maybe - but maybe not.

UPDATE: Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko died under an assumed name in a southern US state at age 81 on August 23, 2008.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082603493.html

Regretfully, the fate of many very good books is to go unnoticed. Sometimes because their subject fails to follow the trend of the moment. Sometimes because their author are still waiting for the hour of their entry into fame. Sometimes because another author monopolizes everyone's attention. Spy Wars belongs to this last category. For, it has been published just six days before George Tenet, former Director of the C.I.A., released his memoir. Bad luck!
The name George Tenet is just more likely to catch public attention than Tennent H. Bagley can.

I finished the last page of Spy Wars one week ago but, to be frank, I am considering a second reading of this unexpected collection of state's secrets whose discovery seriously challenges my previous assumptions on some important moments of our history.

Before being more explicit, perhaps is it useful to explain to you who unravels all those secrets in Spy War.

Tennent H. Bagley, more familiarly known within the walls of the C.I.A. as "Pete" Bagley, is former C.I.A. chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence. As supervisor of C.I.A. operations against the KGB during the hottest times of the Cold War, if I may say so, Tennent H. Bagley was tasked to analyze the precious information soviet defectors brought to the West.
As such he holds today a unique C.I.A. insider's view on U.S. counterintelligence operations and procedures during this period of our history. He also was a direct collaborator of the legendary spymaster and "mole-hunter" James J. Angleton whose life largely inspired the film The Good Shepherd.

In Spy Wars, Tennent Bagley brings most of our attention on the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko to CIA in 1964, and the subsequent battle within the agency over whether Nosenko was a genuine defector or the key figure in a KGB deception operation designed to protect one or more Soviet "moles" inside the American government. Though the purpose of Spy Wars is to shed light in a nearly scientific manner on one of the greatest mysteries of the history of the U.S. counterintelligence, the way the author tackles his subject and organizes its chapters makes this book a fascinating detective story with its unexpected developments and disclosures. But the comparison ends here. Spy Wars is no fiction at all.

A very important aspect of the Nosenko case is that this soviet defector had a KGB insider's knowledge about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived in Soviet Union and expected to become a Soviet citizen. For the record--we never know--Lee Harvey Oswald is the American citizen who, from the heights of a building, shot dead with a scope mounted rifle President John F. Kennedy at Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Tennent H. Bagley's disclosures on the developments of the Nosenko case and its close connections with this of the assassination of John F. Kennedy will question many of your beliefs and assumptions about this tragedy. To say, at some point of Spy Wars we begin to wonder whether the KGB didn't play a role in the assassination of the 35th President of the United States. Although Tennent H. Bagley seems unwilling to express his personal opinion on this, the facts and testimonies he reports about in Spy Wars leave ample room to this hypothesis.

But Tennent H. Bagley didn't limit his purpose to putting down his years at the C.I.A. on paper. For, he also provides the reader with plenty of new information--much of it based on conversations with former (?) KGB officers and some cues and evidences from Soviet archives--and a very important reflection on how judgments are reached by U.S. counterintelligence professionals.

In conclusion of this review, which I could hardly make it less than a praise, I personally consider that Spy Wars is, all at the same time, an authentic thriller for everyone and a must read casebook for would-be counterintelligence officers.
To the attention of the later who has certainly read other classics of this genre such as The Wilderness of Mirrors, Cold Warrior, Mole Hunt and other Spycatcher; Spy Wars might well reach the title of best book, in my own opinion. Anyways, I am pretty sure that in the decade to come Spy Wars will count among the classics of the genre whereas George Tenet's My Years at the C.I.A. will be just one more biography of a C.I.A.' boss.

Dominique R. Poirier

Just finished this book today. I would give it 5 starts but for the occaisionally difficult presentation - note to author: add a series of timelines with people/ops in any future edition.

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 opertations, 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.

"Pete" Bagley, is former C.I.A. chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence, and an expert on the Nosenko affair. This exploration of the Nosenko puzzle is a terrific read for espionage buffs, and those who have tried to unravel the great CI puzzle of the Cold War. Who was Nosenko? If you are as intrigued by this puzzle as I am, you can't go wrong with excellent review of the "old" facts of the case, and the perspective brought in this book after the passage of some much time. This is one case in which the reviews are interesting as the book. Highly recommended for arm-chair intelligence buffs.