AGENTS, ASSASSINS, AND MOLES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81M00980R001200070012-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 1, 2004
• Sequence Number: 12
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2004/07/08: CIA-RDP81 M00980R0012
WASHINGTON POST
.49--elns ts,
ssassins,
.And Moles
LEGEND: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Os-
avald. By Edward Jay Epstein. Reader's Di-
.gest/TcGraw Hill. 382 pp. $12.95
By GEORGE LARDNER
Y URI IVANOVICH NOSENKO had endured far more
arduous interrogations. This one lasted only four
hours and it was not held in the padded basement room
where the Central Intelligence Agency had once confined
him for three long years. Now drawing a $30,000-a-year al-
lowance from that same CIA, Nosenko presented himself
on a March afternoon in 1976 at the Washington offices of
'Reader's Digest. His interviewer, Edward Jay Epstein, con-
cluded the questioning that evening with a flourish: dinner
at an elegant French restaurant a couple of blocks away.
That the interview took place at all was remarkable.
Nosenko is a former KGB officer who defected to the
United States just 10 weeks after the assassination of Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy. According to the CIA, exactly what
he had to say is still so sensitive, so special, so secret that its
disclosure even now could "only interfere with American
counterintelligence efforts." Yet according to Epstein, who
tape-recorded Nosenko's remarks for this book, "the CIA
put me onto him."
No doubt the CIA thought it would get a good press. "I
presume that it found out I was writing a book on Lee Har-
vey Oswald and it wanted me to put Nosenko's message in
It," Epstein told New York magazine recently. "Nosenko's
message was that Oswald was a complete loner In the
Soviet Union and never had any connection or debriefing
by the KGB."
Epstein then began talking to the Agency's formidable
ex-chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. He
had a darker view of Nosenko's presence in this country.
What Epstein has written, hundreds of interviews later,
Is a fascinating, important and essentially dishonest book.
Fascinating because it offers new information about Os-
wald, about: the KGB, and about the CIA. Dishonest because
it pretends to be objective, because it is saddled with
demonstrable errors and inexcusable omissions, because it
GEORGE LARDNER is a reporter on the national staff of
The Washington Post.
assumes that the KGB always knows what it is doing while
the CIA does net. It is paranoid. It is naive.
Nosenko's defection was officially proclaimed by the
State Department on Feb. 9, 1964, whereupon he quickly
disappeared, from public notice. He told the FBI that he
had personally supervised the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Os-
wald and thus could assure the Americans that Oswald had
too connection with the KGB.
Epstein concludes, as Angleton obviously had, that
"Nosenko was a Soviet intelligence agent dispatched by the
LG8 expressly for the purpose of delivering disinforma-
ion to the CIA, FBI and Warren Commission."
in short, Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed lone assassin
of President Kennedy, may well have been working for the
KGB at one point or another in his shabby life. Nosenko
said this wasn't true. And therefore, according to Legend's
logic, it was. Oswald, the ex-Marine who had defected to
Russia in 1959 and returned three years later, had been liv-
ing a "legend," a false biography concocted for him by the
KGB.
That is far from the most startling assertion that Epstein
has to make. Legend is really two books, stretched thin. His
central message, although cushioned with all the careful
ambiguities of a State Department communique, is that the
highest echelons of the American intelligence community
have been infiltrated by the KGB, penetrated by an enemy
"m,ole" who made his way to some key position at the CIA
or some other agency.
it is all quite plausible. The British and West German in,
telligence services had been successfully compromised by
the Soviets since World War II. Kim Philby, who was
recruited at his university, rose to become the head of the
counterintelligence division of Britain's MI-5 before he was
exposed. In West Germany, Epstein notes, the Soviets sue
ceeded in getting their own man, Heinz Felfer, installed as
bead of counterintelligence by sacrificing other agents
"like pawns in a chess game." So why not here? The meta-
physics of espionage, where nothing is what it seems, can
be seductive. Judging from Epstein's book, the best proof
of the existence of an American "mole" lies in the fact that
he hasn't been found yet. Another piece of evidence:
Nosenko told the CIA there was no "Mr. Big." Step up the
search!
Surprisingly, Legend strongest, demonstrably slipshweakest od where hit should be It should be
Epstein's first book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and
the Establishment of Truth, was one of the first to expose
the shortcomings of that inquiry. Yet here he deals with
the Kennedy assassination in a cavalier appendix entitled
"The Status of the Evidence" that makes one wonder
whether Epstein has even glanced at the Warren Report in
the last 10 years. He seems not to have even looked at the
pictures.
Take, for example, Epstein's confident assertion that the
Warren Commission "made a serious error in reckoning
the elapsed time" from the first rifle shot to the last. The
Commission, he declares, staged a reconstruction of the as-
sassination in mid-1964 when the oak tree blocking the line
of sight from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book De-
pository "was in full bloom. But the assassination occurred
on November 22nd when the deciduous tree had no foli-
age." Therefore, the assassin had more time to fire than the
Commission gave him.
Approved For Release 2004/07/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R001200070012-9
 Approved For Release 2004/07/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R001200070012-9
WASHINGTON POST
It sounds like a nifty piece of detective work on the part
of Edward Jay Epstein. But wait a minute. No foliage?
There were plenty of leaves on the live oak (an evergreen)
that AP photographer James W. Altgens captured at the
top of his picture showing the President of the United
States being hit by a bullet on Nov. 22, 1963. The photo-
graph can be found in any copy of the Warren Reriort on
page 113.
This is far from the only shortcom-
ing. The footnotes are too sparse, the
documentation is fuzzy, and occasion.
ally even the dates Epstein cit..'s are
just plain wrong. For a project
financed by Reader's Digest, repor-
tedly for $500,000, the,reader .as a,
right to better scholarship-and to
more information. Epstein tells more
in his promotional interviews about
the book than he does.in the book it-
self.
He assured New York magazine, for
instance, that he really doesn't think
the Russians were involved in JFK's as.
sassination. "I think that the fact that
Oswald traces so clearly back to the
Russians makes it extremely unlikely
that they would have recruited him as
an assassin," Epstein was quoted as
saying in the magazine's March 6 issue.
Epstein does write, in an early chap-
ter, that "Neither Angleton's shop nor
the CIA's Soviet Russia.. division be-
lieved that Oswald was acting under
the control of Soviet intelligence when
he assassinated the president. (In fact,
circumstantial evidence seemed to di-
minish that possibility.) It. seemed far
more likely to both that the relation-
ship Nosenko was attempting to pro-
tect might be a prior connection Os-
wald had had with the KGB." That
said, Legend marches on conspirato-
rially to Nov. 22, 1963 in a chapter
called "The Day of the Assassin,"
which is the concluding segment of a
section subtly titled "The Mission."
The book is full of subliminal messages
that Epstein avoids stating openly.
What, for instance, are'we to think of
all those bungled assassination plots
against Fidel Castro when they have
been hatched in a CIA compromised
by a high-ranking enemy "mole"?
Unfortunately, Legend has a perva-
live weakness, a persistent double
standard. It keeps assigning omnis-
cience to every Soviet move and delib-
erate intent to every omission. But
what the American intelligence agen-
cies do and say is usually kissed off in a
footnote or mentioned only in passing.
Epstein does not even mention, much
less deal with, Nosenko's report to the
FBI that the KGB not only had no con-
nection with Oswald, but also sus-
pected him of being an American
"sleeper" agent.
And what of 'Epstein's perhaps un-
witting disclosures-in the book and in
New York magazine-that Angleton's
counterintelligence experts had inter-
cepted a stridently anti-American let-
ter Oswald wrote to his brother in 1959
and another in which Oswald said he
had seen U-2 pilot Francis Gary Pow-
ers in Moscow. What's going on here?
As late as August 10, 1976, CIA Director
George Bush assured a House subcom-
mittee that "the only correspondence
to or from Oswald that was intercep.
ted was one letter, dated 8 July 1961, to
Mr. and Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald, from
his mother ... " Perversely, for all
its shortcomings, Legend commands
serious attention. It is, as one of the
publisher's blurbs states, "a 'sensa-
tional, highly controversial expose,"
drawn from a storehouse of declassi.
fied documents, including some ob-
tained only by Epstein, and interviews
with more than 400 people, many of
them not interviewed by the Warren
Commission. It throws new light on Os-
wald's life, especially in Japan where
he apparently dated a nightclub host-
ess who cost more than his take-home
pay and where he reportedly "became
involved with a small circle of Japa-
hese communists."
The freshest revelations, however,
are those about Nosenko. That they
came from Angleton and like-minded
colleagues makes them all the more in-
triguing. What former CIA Director
William E. Colby has described as An-
gelton's "ultraconspiratorial view of
the world is apparently no longer in
vogue at the agency. But if his theories
were doubted (Colby, for one, believed
they did the CIA more harm than
good), his brilliance never was. Even
today, no one in the intelligence com-
munity seems brash enough to assert
that Angleton didn't know what he
was talking about. He seems to have
kept too many secrets to himself,
hoarding them like ammunition. In
any case, professional disagreement
with the CIA's chief of counterintelli.
gence was always cautiously stated.
In his own forthcoming book, Hon-
orable Men: My Life in the CIA, Colby
puts it this way:
"I spent several long sessions doing
my best to follow his torturous con-
spiracy theories about the long arm of
.a powerful and wily KGB at work, over
3
Approved For Release 2004/07/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R001200070012-9
 Approved For Release 2004/07/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R001200070012-9
WASHINGTON POST
decades, placing its agents in the heart
-of allied and neutral nations and send-
ing its false defectors to influence and
undermine American policy. I confess
that I couldn't quite absorb it, possibly
because I did not have the requisite
grasp of this labyrinthine subject, pos-
sibly because Angleton's explanations
were impossible to follow, or possibly
because the evidence just didn't add
'up to his conclusions; and I finally con-
'cluded that the last was the only real
.answer. At the same time, I looked in
vain for some tangible results in the
counterintelligence field, and found
little or none. I did not suspect Angle-
ton and his staff of engaging in im-
proper activities. I just could not fig-
ure out what they were doing at all."
Nonetheless, Angleton's suspicions
about Nosenko-at least as reported
by Epstein-cannot be easily dis-
missed. The Russian KGB officer first
surfaced as a CIA informant in 1962,
just six months after another Soviet in-
telligence officer, Anatoli M. Golitsin
(code name: Stone), had defected with
the startling report that a high-rank-
ing "mole" had already been planted
in the American system. Nosenko, in
effect, assured the CIA that the "mole"
was no more than a mouse, a low-rank-
ing American military man who once
worked as a motor pool mechanic at
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Nosenko's own defection In Febru-
ary
of 1964, with his claims to full
knowledge of the KGB case file on Os-
wald, led Angleton and other CIA
skeptics to the discovery of one incon-
sistency after another. But FBI Direc-
tor J. Edgar Hoover wasn't Interested.
According to Epstein, Hoover was
more concerned about covering up the
FBI's failure to keep a closer watch on
Oswald before the assassination. "By
an odd twist of fate, the FBI's interest
lay in concealing, rather than reveal.
ing, any hint of Soviet involvement,"
Epstein writes.
The infighting was evidently fierce.
By the spring of 1964, apparently on
the heels of two FBI intern ws that
took Nosenko at his word, the CIA, re-
portedly with the approval of Attor-
ney General Robert F. Kennedy, put
Nosenko in solitary confinement and
began a grueling "hostile Interroga.
tion" in hopes that the KGB. man
would break down before the Warred
Commission had to submit its report.
The ploy didn't work. The Warren
Commission decided not to question
Nosenko at all, ostensibly following a
June 24, 1964, conference between
Warren and the CIA's Richard Helms.
Helms told the chief justice that it was
still unclear whether Nosenko was a le-
gitimate defector or a Soviet disinfor-
mation agent.
The only trouble with that sequence
Is that the Commission took up the
question of Nosenko the day before,
on June 23,1964. Could it have decided
to call Nosenko, only to have Helms
head off the showdown by buttonhol-'
ing Warren the next morning? No one
knows. The CIA has thus far stead-
fastly refused to let the transcript be
made public-on the mind-boggling .
grounds that the release of any infor-
mation about Nosenko "can only inter-
fere with American counterintelli-
gence efforts."
The CIA kept hammering away at
Nosenko, keeping him in custody with-
out any legal or constitutional author-
ity until 1967. His disbelievers in the
CIA's Soviet Russia division compiled a
900-page report, chronicling all the in-
formation he had provided. It con-
cluded that he was a fake, assigned by
the KGB to mislead the investigators
of President Kennedy's assassination.
But Nosenko had his defenders, too,.
and they finally prevailed with a 500-
page reply that won its author the CIA
intelligence medal. For Nosenko, who
is reputedly under a death sentence in
Mother Russia, the Agency provided a
$30,000-a-year allowance, a new iden-
tity and a new home. Six years later,
Epstein writes in a simplistic version'
of the event, Angleton was forced into
retirement by Colby on the eve of The
New-York Times' disclosure of illicit
domestic activities at the agency. An-
gleton's top aides were forced out with
him.: The new counterintelligence
crowd appointed Nosenko one of its
consultants.
Epstein's conclusion is ominous: With Nosenko accredited and the
counterintelligence staff purged, the
CIA had truly been turned inside out."
Oversimplified? Of course. Over-
stated? Absolutely. Some truth to the
book? Undoubtedly. Where? Who
knows? But watch out for those oak
tree.
Approved For Release 2004/07/08 : CIA-RDP81 M00980R001200070012-9