Spy Wars by Tenant H Bagley

"Spy Wars" is an insider account of CIA Operations Officer, Tenant "Pete" Bagley. The crux of this story is that Bagley was an operations officer in Switzerland when KGB Officer, Yuri Nosenko offered to provide information to the United States government. Nosenko claimed to be a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB and was in Switzerland for a conference.

This is the most contentious story in the short history of the CIA. Two years following this fateful meeting, Nosenko defected to the United States. He claimed to have information about Lee Harvey Oswald, who had recently assassinated President John Kennedy. Nosenko claimed the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination and that he personally handled Oswald's file. While the KGB had interviewed him, they viewed him to be an unreliable nut job and wouldn't meet with him again.

Since this case has not been settled, and even the recent release of the CIA's "Family Jewels" (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_full_ocr.pdf) did not shed much more light on the subject , I will offer my personal opinion.

Warning! This is my personal opinion. Warning!

Yuri Nosenko was a low level bureaucrat in the Russian Government. He may even have worked at the KGB, but was never an operations officer, let along a Lieutenant Colonel. He was dispatched by Moscow to offer information contradicting what a legitimate defector, Anatoly Golitsin had been revealing. While Nosenko did reveal bona fide Russian secrets, these had already been compromised or were long since irrelevant to the KGB.

Nosenko was instructed to defect after President Kennedy's assasination. While the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination, Nosenko's circuitous and incomplete story led some in the agency to believe the KGB was involved. However, this defection was simply the KGB's way of letting the United States know (through back channels) that it had nothing to do with the assassination.

Interrogations (including hostile as referenced by the Family Jewels above) proceeded to allow those involved to see the Nosenko was such a low level individual as to know nothing about KGB headquarters or how a KGB officer would go about his normal routine (where is the cafeteria, where is the bathroom, which is the best parking lot if you are trying to get to Building C kind of stuff).

The hostile interrogation provided enough cover for compromised people within the CIA to remove the entire Soviet Bureau and some Counterintelligence Staff from their positions and replace them with people utterly inexperienced in dealing with Russia. This allowed certain "moles" within the CIA to continue to provide information to the Russians and not be exposed for more than two decades, including Aldrich Ames, who was responsible for exposing several CIA agents (Russian KGB officers providing intel to the CIA).

Bagley was the officer who ran Yuri Nosenko and was in a position to know. We may never know the real truth, but this book is probably as good as it is going to get.