Spy wars : moles, mysteries, and deadly games /

Bagley has an axe to grind. A more than 20-year veteran of the CIA who rose to be chief of Soviet Bloc counterintelligence before retiring shortly before William Colby revealed the Agency's "family jewels," he insists that the "public" history of the CIA is a product of countless lies, often told by the CIA's own. He seeks to set the record straight, especially with regard to the controversial defection of Yuri Nosenko in 1962. He writes that Nosenko, known for disavowing KGB interest in Lee Harvey Oswald, was a KGB plant. He thus reflected and represented the Soviet Union's long history of counterintelligence operations and America's long history of allowing these deceptions to succeed. His positive portrayal of James Jesus Angleton supports his tacit argument that Angleton was right all along. Bagley's evidence, however, is no more credible than Angleton's. Indeed, he continually relies on four-decades-old conversations that he reconstructs verbatim without documentation. Most of these exchanges sound more like words written by Mickey Spillane than John le Carre, let alone dialogue that was actually spoken. Moreover, Bagley makes no effort to explain the significance of his narrative. The result is a disappointing memoir that sheds little light on the Cold War. Summing Up: Optional. General readers through practitioners. R. H. Immerman Temple University

IN the long history of espionage, spies have routinely used hoaxes to fool their enemies. During World War II, the Allies employed Operation Bodyguard - creating an entire fake army - to keep the Germans guessing about where they would land on D-Day. Since the time of the czars, the Russian security services have been especially fond of deception and disinformation. The Communist K.G.B. (and its predecessor, the N.K.V.D.) routinely used false defectors and phony sources to lure and entrap credulous Western spies, who in the early days of the cold war fell for ruses with embarrassing regularity. During the late 1940s and early '50s, the British and Americans sent money and parachuted doomed volunteers behind the Iron Curtain to resistance networks that were actually under Communist control. By the early '60s, American spy catchers had learned to beware of Russians bearing gifts. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. officer who defected to the West in the winter of 1964, seemed, at face value, a prize catch for American intelligence. He professed to be extremely knowledgeable about Soviet agents who had infiltrated American and European embassies, and - most important - he claimed to have detailed knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's alarming flirtation with the Soviet Union. In the panicky hours after John F. Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, United States intelligence discovered that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union back in 1959 and then mysteriously reappeared at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in September 1963, only two months before he shot the president. Could Kennedy's assassin have been a Soviet agent? Nosenko appeared to offer reassurance to the Americans that Oswald was not and had never been in the Communists' employ - that the K.G.B. had, from the beginning, shown little interest in the addled former American marine. To Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley, however, Nosenko's revelations seemed a bit too timely and neatly packaged. As chief of counterintelligence for the agency's Soviet division, Bagley was Nosenko's chief handler. Poring over his interrogation notes on Nosenko and his files on other espionage cases, Bagley began to notice disturbing contradictions and anomalies. Nosenko was clearly a liar and possibly a sociopath. A belligerent drunk, Nosenko - who first gave his rank in the Russian K.G.B. as a colonel but later said he was just a captain - seemed remorseless about leaving behind his wife and two young daughters, if in fact the family really existed. Bagley began wondering if Nosenko was a K.G.B. plant. Had the Russian defector been sent by his Kremlin spy masters to make sure the Americans weren't tempted to start World War III in retaliation for Kennedy's assassination? In time, Bagley began to sniff a sinister plot: that Nosenko had been dispatched to throw off American counterintelligence, to stop the spy catchers from discovering a deep-penetration agent (in official jargon - more familiarly, a mole) inside the C.I.A. America's spy catchers had reason to be suspicious, if not paranoid, in the winter of 1964. The C.I.A.'s two best agents operating inside the Soviet Union, Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov of the G.R.U. (Soviet military intelligence) and Col. Oleg Penkovsky of the K.G.B., had been executed, Popov in 1959 and Penkovsky in 1963. The Soviets claimed that both moles had been unearthed by close surveillance. More likely, Bagley believed, they had been betrayed. In the Popov case, Bagley's suspicions centered on Edward Ellis Smith, the C.I.A.'s first undercover officer in Moscow, who in 1956 had been foolishly caught in a "honey trap" - photographed in flagrante delicto with a Russian maid who was actually a K.G.B. agent. Smith was kicked out of the Soviet Union, but Bagley suspected he had first been compromised and recruited by the K.G.B. He also feared that Penkovsky had been fingered by some other, more deeply buried mole, and that this most valuable Soviet asset - Penkovsky's code name was "hero" and he was later labeled "the spy who saved the world" for his contribution to defusing the Cuban missile crisis - had actually been under surveillance by the K.G.B. for more than a year before he was officially exposed and arrested. Or so it seemed to Bagley. In the "maze of mirrors," as Bagley describes the spy-vs.-spy game in his dense but often fascinating cold war memoir, "Spy Wars," things were often not what they appeared to be. To find out whether Nosenko was telling the truth, the C.I.A. decided to squeeze him a little. The agency men did not resort to the sort of crude violence and intimidation used by Agent Jack Bauer in the television show "24." But Bagley and his colleagues did cut off the prize defector's chaperoned binges, his skirt-chasing and bar-hopping in out-of-the-way Baltimore dives. Instead, the agency forced Nosenko into army fatigues and closeted him in a bare, cell-like attic. He was given lie detector tests and verbally hounded, until, emerging from a "near trance," he "refused to answer any more questions," Bagley says, adding, "He tucked himself into a sort of crouch on his chair, his face closed and grim." Nosenko remained a prisoner for years, nearly incoherent, often unbelievable, but never breaking and baring any secrets. A new memoir defends James Angleton, the former C.I.A. counterintelligence chief, above, and attacks Yuri Nosenko, an ex-officer of the K.G.B. BAGLEY'S superiors in the C.I.A. began to tire of this standoff. Bureaucracies move on. In 1967, Bagley was sent abroad to be station chief in Brussels (not, he asserts, as a punishment for failing to crack Nosenko, but as part of a routine rotation of assignments). A new C.I.A. handler decided that Nosenko was a legitimate defector after all. Incredibly - to Bagley and his closest colleagues in counterintelligence - Nosenko was released in 1968 and essentially exonerated. The former K.G.B. official began giving lectures on Soviet spy craft to the C.I.A. By the 1990s, Nosenko - "this K.G.B. provocateur and deceiver," as Bagley bitterly describes him - was receiving standing ovations from American intelligence professionals gathered in the agency's auditorium in Langley, Va. In the lore of cold war spying, Bagley has been lumped with the C.I.A.'s mysterious counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, in a cabal of paranoids obsessed with a "monster plot" to infiltrate the C.I.A. No less an authority than the former C.I.A. director William Colby accused Angleton and his cohort of paralyzing useful intelligence gathering with a delusional search for moles. Reinforced by books and a recent movie ("The Good Shepherd"), the image has stuck. In his memoir, Bagley vigorously defends himself, as well as Angleton and the cadre of spy catchers who worked in the agency's Soviet Russia division in the early 1960s. Though many intelligence old-timers will not be persuaded, Bagley offers a provocative new look at one of the great unresolved mysteries of the cold war. "Spy Wars" traces a tangled web. Readers will need to be able to adapt to the mind-set of a counterintelligence officer sifting through the odd coincidences, connecting the dots, to fully appreciate and grasp the case against Nosenko. But this game of real-world Clue is worth it. After the cold war, Bagley sought out many of his old K.G.B. adversaries and was able to fill in some of the gaps that frustrated C.I.A. counterintelligence at the time. He does not suggest that the Russians had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination, but he does make one wonder whether the C.I.A. failed to find a mole or two lurking in its midst back in the wintriest days of the cold war. The Russians played the spy game with a kind of fiendish enthusiasm, sacrificing lives and taking risks to outfox their Western adversaries. In the age of Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. chieftain, they no doubt still do. WhenYuri Nosenko defected during the cold war, he seemed a prize catch for American intelligence. Evan Thomas, an editor at Newsweek, is the author of "The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the C.I.A." and, most recently, "Sea of Thunder."

Bagley, who oversaw the CIA's operations against the KGB in the 1960s, takes us deep inside the cold war spy game. He focuses on a notorious case, one he was intimately familiar with: Yuri Nosenko, the KGB officer who approached the Americans in May 1962, offering to divulge secrets to the CIA. Over the next few years, Nosenko supplied the U.S. with plenty of information, including some interesting tidbits concerning Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union. But Bagley, who directly supervised the Nosenko case, eventually became suspicious of the Russian agent and began to suspect that Nosenko, rather than a turncoat, was a KGB plant, spying on the Americans in the guise of a traitor (the debate rages to this day). Bagley doesn't pull any punches here, and readers expecting the usual KGB-as-villain, CIA-as-hero story are in for a whole lot of surprises: Bagley reveals that the good guys were just as duplicitous, traitorous, and nasty as the villains. The spy game has never seemed quite so dirty nor the CIA so villainous. --David Pitt Copyright 2007 Booklist

The spying game just goes on and on. Two years ago we read Victor Cherkashin's Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer, his account (with Gregory Feifer) of how Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames were recruited by the Soviets in the final years of the Cold War. Now Bagley, who was himself a CIA counterspy for over two decades and ended his career as CIA head of Soviet-bloc counterintelligence, tells the oft-told-but never completely understood-tale of Yuri Nosenko's 1964 defection to the United States. Bagley provides plenty of details about the Nosenko case, since he was one of the agents to debrief the Soviet defector. The details in this candid account can sometimes be overwhelming, but Bagley tells his story with an authority that can only come from living the life of a spook for years and years. Was Nosenko a true defector or a KGB "plant"? Bagley comes down on the side of the latter opinion, but his story has enough twists and turns that the real truth may never be known. And that is what makes this book especially intriguing. For most collections.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.