[10 . CLANDESTINE AMERICA - THE MAN WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, MAYBE - NOV-DEC 1979/JAN-FEB 1980]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100190049-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 2, 2004
• Sequence Number: 49
• Publication Date: November 1, 1979
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

4,09/28 - CIA-RDP88-01314R020100190049-2
THE MAN WHO CAME I
FROM THE COLD. MAYBE.
and fired..45 caliber bullets into his auto. The similarity to the Veciana
shooting apparently ends there however, because Muniz was an
enemy of anti-Castro militants due to his sympathy with attempts to
ease tensions between exiles and the Cuban government.
Veciana, now 50, was a Havana accountant who fled Cuba in 1961
and founded Alpha 66 in Puerto Rico in 1962. He directed many raids
against Cuba during the f 960's and has been named as the organizer
of several unsuccessful assassination attempts on Castro, the last
occurring in 1971 when Castro visited Chile.
Veciana is also the source of the Maurice Bishop story. In 1976,
Veciana told Gaeton Fonzi (then a staff investigator for Senator Ri-
chard Schweiker's Intelligence subcmmittee) that an American
named Bishop, who Veciana believed to be an intelligence officer,
had directed him in all of his covert activities from 1961-71, including
the Castro assassination tries. According to Veciana, in August 1963,
when he arrived in the hobby of a Dallas office building to meet with
Bishop, his mysterious contact was already there talking to a young
man. Veciana was not introduced at that time, but after the JFK
assassination he recognized Lee Oswald as the man he had seen
with Bishop.
On July 30, 1978 the HSCA released a composite sketch of Bishop,
produced from a detailed description provided by Veciana, but the
committee was unable to identify him. Based on circumstantial evi-
dence some investigators believe Bishop is former CIA man David
Phillips. (Phillips denies it and so does Veciana). The HSCA investi-
gated the Phillips/Bishop evidence thoroughly, but inconclusively,
and the Veciana allegation about Oswald also remains an "indeter-
minate" mystery. (See HSCA Volume X, pps. 37-56).
Veciana now lives with his wife and children in the Miami area and
works mainly at a marine supply store, which he refers to as "the
family business." He also has a few investments and dabbles in
boxing promotions, which he had been doing for many years in Puerto
Rico.
In recent years he has been termed a "non-active" member of
Alpha 66. Although he is still involved in the exile movement, "he's
way behind the scenes at this point," says one source close to him.
"You won't see or hear of him coming forth as a spokesman as he had
been doing years ago. But he told me once that more than anything
else in his life he wants to kill Castro."
One of the more intriguing figures in the JFK assassination case is
Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a former KGB officer who defected to the
United States fifteen years ago with a story to tell about Lee Harvey
Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union. Nosenko was the highest-rank-
ing Soviet intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, and
for a brief moment he enjoyed his status as a major prize of the spy
wars. But soon the CIA began to doubt the truth of his information and
to suspect he might be a Soviet penetration agent-a "mole." The
agency clapped him into a five-year imprisonment, complete with
torture. Years later, after a bitter internal dispute within the CIA, his
tormentors changed their minds again, declared him a good-faith
defector, and brought him onto the CIA payroll as a consultant. There
he remained for ten years until a congressional investigating commit-
tee fingered him as a suspicious character and a liar after all, raising
again thequestion of whether he might also be a Soviet mole, as had
originally been suspected.
These sharp changes in Nosenko's fortunes with the CIA definethe
main twists of a spystorythat has become basictoour understanding
of the JFK assassination, the conflict within the CIA, the apparent
murder a year ago of a covert CIA officer namedJohn Paisley, and the
still-unfolding drama of alleged Soviet moles in the top levels of the
CIA. Dormant for years, the Nosenko affair may now be growing into
the most important spy story since that of Nathan Hale.
Oswald reached Moscow in October, 1959, announced his defec-
tion, and applied for citizenship in the Soviet Union. His quid pro quo
was that he had important military secrets to divulge, an offer that (as
we now know) put him in the secret sights of the Second Directorate
of the KGB's Seventh Department, the unit responsible for counterin-
telligence surveillance of tourists and defectors. Yuri Nosenko was
deputy ch ief of this unit. Thus, he was the administrator of the KGB's
Oswald file.
In the Soviet Union, Oswald was an enthusiastic comrade at first,
but then grew disenchanted and homesick. In February, 1961, he
applied to the U.S. embassy in Moscow for repatriation to the states.
In March, he met Marina Pruskova. In April, he married her. A year
later, in June, 1962, he and Marina left the Soviet Union for Texas.
Nosenko, then serving as the KGB security escort to the Soviet
delegation at the arms-control talks in Geneva, also madea big move
that month. He found a private place and moment to ask an American
diplomat to put him in touch with an appropriate U.S. intelligence
officer. He had a proposal to make.
Soon Nosenko was talking secretly with the CIA's Geneva counter-
intelligence officer, Tennant "Pete" Bagley. Nosenko's story was that
he had gone on a foolish drunken spree and spent nine hundred
Swiss francs belonging to the KGB. He had to replace it quickly.
Otherwise he would bediscovered, fired, and heavily penalized. But if
the United States could meet his small financial needs, he could
survive. For such support, Nosenko would supply certain pieces of
information in which he was sure the United States would be inter-
ested, such as the location of the KGB bugs in theAmerican embassy
in Moscow or the identities of Soviet agents working within the U.S
intelligence system. He did not want to defect overtly. He had a family
in the Soviet Union. He would not give them up. Nor would he talk to
the CIA inside the Soviet Union, only when he was in Geneva,
Bagley encouraged Nosenko. An agent-in-place was the most use
ful of all defectors, because he could maintain a constant flow of fresh
intelligence and be directed toward specific targets.
But soon a doubt began to form in Bagley's mind about Nosenko.
The problem was with the quality of intelligence Nosenko was deliv-
ering. A previous Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsin(called Mr. X in the
House Select Committee on Assassinations' final report), had given
the U.S. much the same information in even sharper form. The
Soviets knew, of course, that Golitsin had already divulged or com-
promised the information that Nosenko was now fobbing off as hot
ApproV90 For Release 20021109128 7CIA-RD"Oem
 new stuff. As Bagley later told the asassinations committee in execu-
tive session, he had begun to think that Nosenko was in fact" a sent
KGB agent dispatched to deflect and negate" the authentic informa-
tion of Golitsin. Bagley came to think, moreover, that Nosenko was
not the man he said he was, that he had never been the deputy chief
of the Second Directorate, that he had never administered Oswald's
KGB file, and that the whole story was a "legend," a cover story for a
deep-penetration mission.
in September of 1963, Oswald was in Mexico City. He applied at the
Soviet embassy for a visa to the Soviet Union. Nosenko later told his
CIA and FBI questioners that he had personally reviewed and rejected
this application, even though he was not now connected with the
Second Directorate. He also said that in late November, after the
killings in Dallas,. he had reviewed the entire KGB Oswald file.
But now came a sudden change. On January 23, 1964, on Nosen-
ko's first visit to Geneva after the assassination of JFK, Nosenko told
Bagley that he had changed his mind about defecting. He was disillu-
sioned with the Sovietsystern. His family would he taken care of. He
wanted to come to the United States and begin a new life.
Bagley hesitated. His suspicions of Nosenko had not yet hardened
but were hard to deny. He put Nosenko off.
Then, a week and a half later, Nosenko forced the issue. On Febru-
ary 4, he informed Bagley that he had just received a wire from KGB
headquarters calling him home. He was sure he had been found out
or was about to be. If he went back to Moscow, he would never come
out again. Itwas now or never. Bagley swallowed his misgivings, and
the CIA spirited Nosenko off to Washington. He was almost a free
man.
Nosenko had already been questioned twice about Oswald by the
ClAwhile he was still in Geneva, onJanuary23 and 30, 1964. Having
arrived in the states in late February, he was questioned again on
Oswald, this time by the FBI.
The FBI accepted Nosenko's story of Oswald's stay in the Soviet
Union-that the KGB had been hardly interested in Oswald at all, that
it had carried out only the most perfunctory and routine surveillance
of his activities, and that in no way-this was the bottom line and the
real point-was Oswald a KGB assassin in Dallas. Nosenko's mes-
sage was: Oswald may have looked like a juicy intelligence morsel,
butthe KGB had declined the bait, had paid him no special attention,
and if he had killed the president, the U.S.S.R. was not to blame. .
A plausible message. What Soviet need to see JFK eliminated
could have been so piercing as to motivate the immense risk of an
assassination scheme? But senior officers of the CIA, like Bagley, did
not accept his claim.
What made Nosenko's story impossible for the CIA to accept in
those early days was what he said about Oswald and the KGB. For
what Nosenko told his CIA questioners about the KGB's attitude
toward Oswald didn't correspond at all with the CIA's best idea of the
Soviet spy manual. The CIA could not believe that the Soviets would
ignore a target like Oswald, who bragged of his information on U.S.
radar and hinted(some said) at knowledge of the U-2 aircraft-at that
point the CIA's most secret secret. As Bagley told the House asassina-
tions committee much later, "the KGB ... would face an American
swimming into their sea ... like a pool of piranhas."
Sowhen Nosenko said the piranhas only yawned at Oswald, Bagley
couldn't believe it. Nosenko hadto be lying. If he was lying about this,
what else was he lying about?
And this was important. As then-deputy director of the CIA Ri-
chard Helms told the House committee last September, "It is difficult
to overstate the significance that Yuri Nosenko's defection assumed
in the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination. If Mr.
Nosenko turned out to be a bona fide defector, if his information were
to be believed, then we could conclude that the KGB and the Soviet
Union had nothing to do with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 and there-
fore had nothing to do with President Kennedy's murder.
"If on the other hand," continued Helms, "Mr. Nosenko had been
programmed in advance by the KGB to minimize KGB connections
with Oswald, if Mr. Nosenko was giving us false information about
Oswald's contacts with the KGB in 1959 to 1962, it was fair for us to
surmise that there may have been an Oswald-KGB connection in
November, 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a
Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy.
"If it were shown that Oswald was in fact acting as a Soviet agent
when he shot President Kennedy," Helmswent on, "the consequen-
ces to the United States of America and indeed to the world, would
have been staggering. Thus, it became a matter of the utmost impor-
tance to this government to determine the bona fides of Mr. Yuri
Nosenko."
By March, 1964, Nosenko's credibility with the CIA had totally
eroded. No one believed him about Oswald, and few believed him
about anything else. Helms,. Bagley (by this time promoted to deputy
chief of the Soviet Bloc Division), and Bagley's superior, David
Murphy, were united with the chief of CIA counterintelligene, James
Angleton, in viewing Nosenko, as Bagley put it, as "a false defector on
a disinformation mission."
Nosenko may have still thought at this time that he carrieda little
clout. Through the FBI, he offered to tell the Warren Commission all
he know about Oswald.Theofferwas rejected. Nosenko's name does
not appear in the Warren Report.
On April 4, 1964, meeting what he thought was a doctor's
appointment, Nosenko was arrested by the CIA and transported to a
specially prepared safe house in North Arlington, Virginia, where he
was confined in a cell that his current CIA defender, John Hart, told
the committee was "most comparable to a bank vault." When
Nosenko failed a lie-detector test; the CIA became convinced that he
was an unregenerate Soviet agent. But Nosenko refused to budge
from his story.
This led the CIA to the use of inquisitorial methods. Under the
control of David Murphy's interrogation team-including John Pais-
ley, an officer who will reenter the narrative much later as a corpse-
Nosenko was isolated in solitary confinement in his CIA bank vault
for more than three years. He was tortured during thistime. Overall,
the CIA kept him in custody for about five years.
The revelation last fall of this sorry episode was at once logged in as
yet another CIA scandal. The CIA's John Hart, part of the pro-Nosenko
group that took charge of Nosenko in 1968,-flatly called it "an
abomination."
To which Bagley replied before the committee, "Please bear in
mind that I find this case... just as'abominable' as Mr. Hart does. It's
implications are ugly. It imposed immense and unpleasant tasks upon
us and strains upon the agency, which are all too visible today in your
committee's hear.ings_"
The central problem facing the CIA, Bagley said, was "Nosenko's
credibility and what lies behind his message to America concerning
the KGB's relations with Lee Harvey Oswald." He went on, "The
detention of Nosenko was designed initially to give us an opportunity
to confront him with certain contradictions in his story ... Our aim
was, as Mr. Hart said, to get a confession: either of KGB sponsorship
or of which lies could, finally, form some believable pattern."
The sticking point in Nosenko's story was his stubborn assertion
that Oswald had not been of serious interest to the KGB. David
Murphy told assassinations committee counsel Ken Klein, "The So-
viet Union with foreigners don't do that," and went on to explain the
importance to the Soviets of Oswald's technical knowledge of the U-2
spy plane. That Nosenko should maintain that the KGB did not ques-
tion Oswald or closely watch his activities in the Soviet Union despite
this knowledge, explained Murphy, "is one of the things that created
an atmosphere of disbelief, [a feeling] that there must be something
to this case that is important, vitally important, to the Soviet Union,
and we can't understand it."
Nosenko had had other problems with the CIA as well. His leads
had not been useful. Golitsin had already told it all. The CIA's back-
ground check was turning up indicatior 3 that Nosenko was not the
 person he said he was. Two previous defectors whose usefulness to
the U.S. had been established were skeptical of him. But his biggest
problem remained his story about Oswald. That was the story he
seemed to have come to tell, and that was the story no one could
believe.
In 1966 Nosenkowas given another polygraph examination. Again
he failed. Helms knew, too, that Murphy and Bagley were preparing a
gigantic document, called "TheThousand-Page Report,"fully stating
their argument that Nosenko was a KGB plant.
But Helms faltered at this point. "I made the decision," he told the
committee, "that the case simply could not go on in that fashion; it
had to be resolved." In October, 1967, Helms assigned BruceSolie of
the CIA Office of Security to review the case. Solie at once objected to
the isolation of Nosenko and had him moved to comfortable quarters.
In February, 1968, the CIA Soviet Bloc Division submitted a four-
hundred-page condensation of the original report, concluding that
Nosenko was a liar. But Nosenko now had a CIA defender in Bruce
Solie. Solie responded tothefour hundred pages with eighteen pages
of his own, criticizing the Murphy-Bagley conclusion and saying that
Nosenko was a good-faith defector who was telling what he thought
to be the truth about Oswald and the KGB. Solie recommended
further interviews by new people and another lie-detector test.
Nosenko's third polygraph exam was administered in August,
1968, under the supervision of Solie's Office of Security rather than
Murphy's Soviet Bloc Division. There is no ready explanation for the
fact that Nosenko was said to have passed this third test. But ten
years later, the House assassinations committee brought in an inde-
pendent polygraph expert to review the 1964, 1966, and 1968 tests.
The expert concluded that only the second of these was valid-one of
the two, of course, that Nosenko failed. But that was ten years later. I n
1968, the new test appeared to put Nosenko back on the sunny side of
the CIA.
Then in October, 1968, Nosenko-advocate Solie issued an in-
house memo disputing all the findings of the Murphy-Bagley report.
"Nosenko," wrote Solie, is identical to the person he claims to be."
As for the Oswald-KGB question, said Solie, that was "an FBI mat-
ter." He had no reason to disbelieve Nosenko or question his sincerity
on this point. Solie told the committee that he "did not have all the
facts" on Oswald because Oswald was not a main area of CIA inter-
rogation of Nosenko. The statement directly conflicted with Helms'
testimony that Oswald's stay in Russia constituted-"no question
about it"-a major area of CIA questioning of Nosenko.
Later in 1968, over the anguished protests of Murphy and Bagley,
and their interrogation team, the CIA. formally conceded Nosenko's
good faith and authenticity. On the first of March, 1969, Nosenko was
compensated for his time under arrest and "employed as an inde-
pendent contractor for the CIA" at a salary of $ 16,500 a year. "I was
imprisoned for the whole five years," said Nosenko to the House
assassinations committee, "and I started my life in the U.S.A. in April
of 1969.
By 1973, Helms and James Angleton, strong Nosenko skeptics,
had been pushed out of the agency. John Hart authored aCIA internal
study of the Nosenko controversy and found that Nosenko, though not
reliable on the Oswald-KGB question, was sincere.
Nosenko was thus vindicated. Soon he was lecturing CIA and FBI
classses on Soviet intelligence. But his problems were not over.
In 1976 Congress created the House Select Committee on Assas-
sinations to look into the controversies surrounding the murders of
President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. By the middle of 1977,
a deputy counsel for the committee, Ken Klein, was assigned full time
to the Nosenko question. Said one of Klein's colleagues on the commit-
tee staff, "Kennywas in a bit over his head on Nosenko and the whole
Kennedy case, but he worked on nothing but Nosenko for a year, and
finally he broke him down."
The breaking of Nosenko, after all these years and efforts, took
place early in the summer of 1978. Klein put Nosenko through some
twenty hours of hostile interrogation, playing constantly upon the
myriad contradictions and inconsistencies in Nosenko's story. "Fie
just went to tatters when we got to him," said the staffer.
What did the breaking. of Nosenko reveal? While the transcript of
this particular encounter is not available, it is known that, in the end,
"the committee was certain Nosenko had lied about Oswald."
Under the pressure of Klein's questioning, Nosenko changed his
Oswald story in two particularly important respects. The first, key one
involves the KGB file on Oswald. Nosenko formerly characterized this
file as all but nonexistent. He insisted that the KGB had carried out no
surveillance of Oswald and that he personally had "thoroughly re-
viewed Oswald's file." Now he told the Congress that this file com-
prised "seven or eight thick volumes," most of them containing
"information relating to the surveillance" of Oswald by the KGB, and
only one of which Nosenko said he had a chance to look at.
Second, Nosenko had always maintained that the KGB didn't know
anything about Oswald's relationship with Marina until they were
married. "There was no surveillance on Oswaldto show that he knew
her," he told the FBl in 1964. But in 1978, when counsel Klein asked
him, "If [Oswald] met Marina on March 17, how long would you
estimate it would take before the KGB would know about her?"
Nosenko's answer was: "In the same March they would have quite a
big batch of material on her."
So a completely different picture of the KGB's interest in Lee and
Marina Oswald emerged, and with it a completely different picture of
Nosenko's defection. The committee does not go so far as to say that
Nosenko was-is-a Soviet plant. "In the end," reads its final report,
"the committee [liketheWarren Commission), was unable to resolve
the Nosenko matter." But as a staff member confided shortly after the
report was published last summer, "Yeah., basically I would really
have to go with the theory that he's a plant."
Suppose this is correct. If Nosenko lied when he said that Oswald
had not been closely watched and questioned by the KGB, was he
also lying when he said that Oswald had not been recruited by the
KGB and that he was not a Soviet agent or assassin when he returned
to the states?
One's first impulse, of course, is to assume that whatever a liar
says isthe opposite of thetruth. If Nosenko is a liar, and saysOswald
was not a KGB agent, then Oswald must have been a KGB agent, If
Nosenko, the liar, says that the Soviet Union did not send Oswald to
kill Kennedy, then the Soviet Union must be the one to blame.
Is that what the CIA thought about the JFK assassination until. the
middle of 1968? That the Russians did it?
Bagley protested to the committee that, even though he thought
Oswald a KGB agent, he did not think the Soviets had ordered him to
kill Kennedy. Nosenko's"message," said Bagley, "hides the possibili-
ty that [Oswald] is or could have been a Soviet agent. [But] by'Soviet
agent' I don't mean a Soviet assassination agent. I mean something
quite different... Perhaps he was a sleeper agent... They may have
said,'Wewill get in touch with you in time of war'... But then if he is
on their rolls as a sleeper agent or for wartime sabotage or something
of that sort, they would be absolutely shocked to hear their man had
taken it upon himself to kill the American president." And as Bagley
says elsewhere, "The Soviets have shown a proclivity to use tricky
methods like this to give us messages through clandestine mcni s."
Thus, he thinks the KGB "might indeed changethe mission of anoth-
er man of another operation [Nosenko] in order to get this message
over to us, that they really had nothing to dowith[the assassination]."
But this fine distinction was lost as the CIA's interpretation of
Oswald's alleged act percolated up to President Johnson. Earl
Warren writes that he at first resisted Johnson's request that he head
up the JFK inquiry, and that Johnson "then told me how serious were
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the rumors floating aroundthe world. The gravity of the situation was
such that it might lead us into war, he said, and if so, it might be a
nuclear war. He went onto tell me that he had just talked to Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara, who had advised him that the first
nuclear strike against us might cause the loss of forty million people. I
then said, 'Mr. President, if the situation is that serious, my personal
views do not count. I will do it.' He thanked me, and I left the White
House."
What can this mean if riot that the CIA's theory of the JFK assassi-
nation led Johnson, and thus Warren, to fear that the price of the
truth in this case could easily be World War III? Nosenko's apparent
lies about Oswald in Russia became the basis of that fear.
But this view of Nosenko and Oswald did not, and does not, prevail.
The asassinations committee finally declared that "there is no evi-
dencethat the Soviet government had any interest in removing Pres-
ident Kennedy, nor is there any evidence that it planned to take
advantage of the president's death before it happened or attempted to
capitalize on it after it occurred." The committee concluded, there-
fore, "on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet
government was not involved in the assassination."
Well, If it is true that Oswald was not a Russian agent assigned to
shoot the president, then Nosenko told the truth on that count. If
Nosenko is nevertheless thought to have lied substantially about
Oswald and the KGB, what could be the explanation for his strange
mixture of truth and lies?
And to come to the practical heart of the whole Nosenko mystery,
why, if the Russians had nothing to do with Kennedy's death, would
they have contrived so intricate a method of conveying this critical
information as that of a false defector? Said Bagley, "Why they might
have selected this channel to send [this information], and what truth
may lie behind the story given to us, can only be guessed at ... I
couldn'tfind any logical or any illogical explanation for why [Nosenko]
said what he said about Oswald."
A.source on the assassinations committee staff expressed. the
same bewilderment: "You'd have to assume that Khrushchev and
even Brezhnevwould have had to makethe decision to send Nosenko
in here like that. And itwould have looked so risky. I just can't see why
they would have made that decision. When [Nosenko] breaks down,
he sobs, he gets real bitter, and he says he doesn't care what we
believe, but if we ever try to torture him again, the word is going
straight out to Daniel Schorrl"
I needed clarification on this, Was there any suggestion that No-
senko had a continuing espionage role?
"No;" said the source, "nobody says that. The theory is that he was
sent to do the JFK. stuff."
How does this bear on CIA internal power struggles?
"Well, Angleton and those people [i.e., the anti-Nosenko group]
really had to go. They were the most sinister of all people there."
"Really?" I asked. "More sinister than William Colby?" (Colby took
over from Helms as CIA head in 1973.)
"Oh, sure!"
"The Colby who supervised the assassination of some 50,000
Vietnamese people in Operation Phoenix?"
The source laughed. "Oh, well, thatl But I mean, apart from mass
murder, you know, Colby's pretty straight!"
I have a simpler explanation-a rather innocent explanation, in
fact-for why the Soviet leadership might have chosen the Nosenko
method of communicating to the United States leadership that
Kennedy was not a Soviet victim.
Grant Bagley's point about the "piranhas" of the KGB and assume
that Oswald, indeed, had been questioned at length and in detail by
Soviet intelligence people. Assume, too, that the Soviets at the same
time remained wary of Oswald and found him too unstable and
mysterious for recruitment. The KGB took what it could get from him,
?9iiCi 13
was very possibly surprised at the usefulness of his information,
rewarded him with a nice job and a comfortable apartment and the
privilege of owning and shooting a rifle, and kept him at arm's length.
So Oswald goes home, and in a year and a half, Kennedy is killed.
The Soviets are shocked to see their friend Oswald accused, then
killed himself. Their urgent review of the KGB Oswald file discloses
that a paranoid imagination could easily be led to see Oswald as a
KGB recruit. That was not true, but it looked true, just as though
Oswald had been groomed for that very purpose. Was someone trying
to frame the KGB for the Kennedy assassination? How could the
Soviets convincingly inform the wounded, suspicious Americans that
appearances were, in this case, deceiving? A convincing reassurance
could not be given by officials because, if the assassination of JFK
were an official Soviet act, naturally, Soviet officials would be sworn
to keep it secret.
So if the Soviets' message that Oswald was not a KGB assassin
were to be delivered as a fact commanding belief, then they would.
have to deliver it through somebody in a position to know it for a fact.
That meant the message had to come from the KGB, because only
someone from the KGB, and indeed from the specific KGB section
that handled Oswald, could even begin to know whether Oswald was
or was not a target of serious KGB surveillance while he was in
Russia, or whether he was or was not dispatched to the United States
as a sleeper, assassin, or whatever by the KGB.
In fact, such a message could only be delivered by a KGB.defector.
KGB in order to know the truth, and a defector in order to want to tell it
to the Americans. No other communication channel would even be
logical. No matter how risky the Nosenko method must have looked,
the very logic of the situation, as in.a game of chess, may have
demanded it.
On the afternoon of September 25, 1978, ten days after John Hart,
CIA, defended Nosenko before the House assassinations committee
and just three days after Richard Helms, CIA, restated the case
against him, the skipper of a crab boat in lower Chesapeake Bay
looked up from hiswork to see bearing down on him a graceful sailing
sloop, Bril/ig.
The wind was brisk. The Bril/ig was light in the water and clipped
along in the light chop rapidly on a collision course. The crabber
finally realized theBril/ig had not seen him, though th.e day was clear.
He.hit his engines. He barely managed to clear theBrillig's charging
bow. Angrily he radioed the Coast Guard to complain. It is not known
if he noticed there was no one aboard the Brillig.
Coast Guardsmen discovered the empty sailboat grounded a few
hours later, farther down the bay. Aboard they found an open jar of
mustard and a half-made sandwich in the galley, a folding table torn
off its hinges, secret CIA documents relating to Soviet military capa-
bility, and a highly classified burst transceiver, used onlytc transmit
and receive sophisticated radio codes. The tiller was unlocked.
In just a few hours the Bri/lig was identified as John Paisley's craft
and Paisley was identified as a "former" high-level official of the CIA
now working for the agency on a consulting basis on a highly sensi-
tive study of CIA assessments of Soviet capability. When last heard
from in a routine radio call he had sent earlier that day, announcing
that he was coming in, Paisley was aboard theBril/ig. NowtheLfrillig
was beached and Paisley was missing.
When Paisley's estranged wife, Maryann, heard of the beaching of
the Bril/ing, she sent their son, Eddie, twenty-two, to check out his
father's apartment. Eddie found the place ransacked and all of Pais-
ley's papers gone. Several nine-millimeter bullets were scattered on
the closet floor. Mrs. Paisley was all the more distressed to hear of
this break-in because Paisley's apartment was in the some building,
on the same floor, and off the same hallway as apartments of Soviet
embassy employees whom Maryann Paisley knew to be under con-
stant CIA surveillance.
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 M 14 0 1a"4 . rn" aoaw-w-
On October 1 a year ago, the Coast Guard pulled a body from the
bay. Itwas bloated and badly decomposed. Positive identificationwas
impossible. But a consensus emerged among examiners, insurance
agents, and two Paisley acquaintances who saw the body, that it was
John Paisley's-despite such disturbing physical differences as the
fact that Paisley stood 5'11 ", weighed 170 pounds, wore a heard and
a full head of hair, while the body fished out of the bay was four inches
shorter, 30 pounds lighter, beardless, and bald.
There was a nine-millimeter gunshot wound behind the body's left
ear. There were thirty-eight pounds of diving weights strapped
around its waist.
The official verdict was suicide, but Maryann Paisley did not believe
it. She retained long-time family friend Bernard Fensterwald, the
Washington attorney who handled James McCord during Watergate
days, to try to fight the cover-up.
Mrs. Paisley called attention to her own "CIA background" in a
furious letter she wrote at the beginning. of this year to CIA director
Stansfield Turner, protesting the CIA's "hands-off" attitude toward
her husband's death..
"I was particularly anxious for Mr. Fensterwald to talk with Kath-
erine Hart," she wrote, "because it is her husband, John, who is the
agency's expert on Yuri Nosenko. You know that John Paisley [whose
"activities," she wrote elsewhere, "were certainly not confined to the
overt side"] was deeply involved in Nosenko's indescribable debrief-
ing. It has crossed my mind, and that of others, that my husband's fate
might be somehow connected with the Nosenko case.'
So Paisley was part of Nosenko's "indescribable debriefing," was
he? It is known from other sources that in 1972 and 1973 Paisley was
also involved heavily in a CIA-wide search for a suspected Soviet
mole. Paisley's job was then to determine if Soviet defectors were
double agents, and he directly questioned Nosenko and another So-
viet defector who came over at the same time, Soviet navy captain
Nicholas Shadrin, who disappeared while walking through a public
square in Vienna in 1975.
Thus, Paisley was a part of the group that regarded Nosenko as a
false defector. Sowe can add his nameto a group made up of Helms,
Bagley, Murphy, and Angleton, none of whom are working for the CIA
anymore, either.
Nosenko, however, as you read this, is drawing a CIA salary of
$35,325 a year and lecturing our counterintelligence trainees and
future foreign-liason officers on the Soviet practice of the intelligence
arts, as well as playing some direct role in current CIA counterintelli-
gence operations.
This is not, alas, a finished story. Questions abound. Was it really
Paisley's body that was found so sea-changed in Chesapeake Bay? If
not, who might have orchestrated the cover-up that identified the
body as his? And why? Is there substance to Maryann Paisley's belief
that her husband was deeply involved in covert CIA operations and
the Nosenko interrogation? Could Paisley's strange disappearance,
as his wife suspects, have had anything to do with the assassinations
committee's breaking of Nosenko's Oswald story shortly before? Was
Nosenko a false defector sent to conceal a Soviet role in the assassi-
nation of Kennedy? Or to convey, through a calculated lie, the essen-
tial truth of Soviet innocence in the JFK murder?
On such mysteries, the Nosenko matter-perhaps from now on it
should be called "the Nosenko-Pais/ey matter"-hangs in uncertain-
ty and suspense, waiting for someone's next move.
[Reprinted courtesy of Boston Magazine. This article originally ap-
peared in the October, 1979 issue.]
1. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept The Secrets-Richard Helms
and the CIA, Knopf, New York, 1979.
2. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, MeyerLansky - Mogul of
the Mob, Paddington Press, New York and London, 1979.
3. William C. Sullivan with Bill Brown, The Bureau -My Thirty Years
in Hoover's FBI, W.W. Norton, New York, 1979.
4. G. Robert Blakey and David Bel-in letters, National Review,
9/28/79.
5. Jeff Goldberg, "Who Killed John Paisley?", Inquiry, 10/15/79.
6. Joseph Daughen and John Farmer, "The War Inside the CIA,"
PhiladelphiaBulletin, 9/23 thru 9/27/79. Five partseries on moles,
Nosenko, Paisley and the Helms-Colby rift.
FUTURE KCS
Several books on the JFK case are in progress and expected to be
published in the next year. Here's a quick rundown:
1. Echoes of Conspiracy, by Peter Dale Scott, Paul Hoch, Josiah
Thompson, and Russell Stetler will probably be the first book out on
the HSCAReport. Publication from Pocket Books is anticipated in late
winter. It features commentary on the HSCA's acoustics/ ballistics
analysis, a history of the committee and theJFK issue, and Professor
Scott's detailed research into the cover-up.
2. Not In Your Lifetime, by Anthony Summers for McGraw-Hill is
also scheduled for later this winter. Summers, a British author/film
producer(1978 BBC documentary, "TheJFK Assassination: What Do
We Know Now That We Didn't Know Then?"), has written a first
person investigative account covering information he dug up the past
two years in Dallas, New Orleans, Miami, Mexico City, and Washing-
ton-much of which corroborates the HSCA Report.
3. Sylvia Meagher has compiled a complete subject/name index to
the HSCA's Report, hearings, and appendices which is scheduled to
be published this winter by Scarecrow Press, NYC. Professor Gary
Owens of Huron College in Canada is assisting on the project.
4. G. Robert Blakey and former HSCA staffer Richard Billings are at
work on an inside look at the HSCA investigation for New York Times
Books (no publication date set).
manuscript (title, subject and publisher are still classified by the
 n
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