The Family Jewels (16 page)

No masterspy, Yuri Nosenko did not help himself with his shifting stories, fabrications and exaggerations, vague and implausible accounts of his career in Soviet intelligence, and party animal antics. Yet even before being permitted into the United States, Nosenko provided information that led to the apprehension of a Russian spy in Britain and an American turncoat at NATO headquarters, and the uncovering of massive KGB bugging (fifty-two microphones) in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. But Nosenko's CIA handlers were already suspicious. At length the agency decided to bring this Russian to the United States and question him in detail.

On April 2, 1964, Richard Helms, by now the CIA's deputy director for operations, met with Justice Department officials, who agreed that Nosenko's legal status could be left undefined. Rather than admit the defector to the United States as a resident or grant him political asylum, the Department temporarily “excluded” Nosenko but paroled him to the custody of the CIA. Helms later relied upon this ambiguous immigration status to maintain that Nosenko's detention was legally justified.
¹
The case, Helms would record, “was the most frustrating operation in my experience, and was to plague me from my post as deputy director . . . through much of my service as Director of Central Intelligence.”
²

The Soviet Russia Division of Mr. Helms's directorate had primary responsibility for the care and feeding of Yuri Nosenko, and its agents' frustrations increased as the man's stories failed to add up. Tennent H. (“Pete”) Bagley, the case officer the Russian had originally approached, confronted his boss with the need to interrogate Nosenko more thoroughly. Soviet Division brass decided to sequester the Russian spy. Division experts and CIA Counterintelligence set out to
“break” Nosenko, and they did it inside the United States. Richard Helms reflected the agency's increasing doubts. He privately approached Chief Justice Earl Warren, lead investigator on the Kennedy assassination, to tell him the CIA would not vouch for Foxtrot's information and warn him the Warren Commission should not take Nosenko seriously.

The inquisitors decided to subject the Russian to a lie detector examination and then, no matter what the polygraph said, impugn him for lying. That took place two days after the CIA's meeting with the Justice Department, and immediately upon Nosenko's return from a vacation in Hawaii. The inquisitors had no need to accuse falsely—the polygraph showed strong evidence of deception. An inquisitor immediately screamed at Nosenko, yelling that he was a phony. Guards entered the room. The captive was stripped naked. After that the Russian was kept in the attic. This proved the start of seven months of intensive questioning. A bare light-bulb and a narrow cot were the only furnishings. Nosenko was not allowed to keep a toothbrush or toothpaste and could shower and shave only once a week. A pair of guards in the hall kept him under constant watch.

The “KU/Bark Manual,” the CIA inquisitor's bible, discusses at length how friendly relations with a subject are best suited to eliciting accurate data. It specifically finds strong-arm methods counterproductive. This official doctrine on intelligence interrogation was in force at the time of the Nosenko affair. The manual lays down a relatively sophisticated position, cautioning, “
it is vital that this discussion not be misconstrued as constituting authorization for the use of coercion
” (italics in the original), notes that “intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions,” and adds that “the threat of death has often been found to be worse than useless,” warning that unauthorized use of coercive techniques can put both interrogators “and KUBARK”
in “unconsidered jeopardy.” Effective technique was to build affinity with the subject.
³

Nosenko's interrogators threw away the book.

James Angleton's Counterintelligence (CI) Staff spearheaded analysis of the Nosenko data, with a unit known as the Special Intelligence Group producing leads for the inquisitors. That was under Birch D. O'Neal, who had been CIA liaison to the Warren Commission and had previously been CIA station chief in Guatemala.
⁴
O'Neal's group was custodian of the agency's file on Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged Kennedy assassin, and Nosenko claimed to have been the Soviet intelligence officer in charge of keeping a watch on Oswald while he lived in Russia. According to Helms, Jim Angleton's advice, given early on and repeated, was to release Nosenko, then follow him to see what he might do.
⁵
Peter Deriabin, a KGB defector from the early 1950s, also furnished leads, picking holes in the Russian's fanciful tales. Pete Bagley remained convinced Nosenko was a plant.
⁶

It was Bagley who managed the day-to-day operation. Angleton kept a finger on the pulse of the interrogation. The counterspy undoubtedly perceived Nosenko as a threat. Richard Helms's professed motive in ordering the inquisition was to determine once and for all the veracity of Nosenko's claims that the KGB had had nothing to do with Kennedy's assassin Oswald. No doubt Helms wanted any CIA mole found too, and Angleton must have assured him the inquisitors were nearing their goal. In November 1964 Helms ordered the case wound up. Faced with persistent contradictions, the Soviet Division could not make up its mind. Helms canceled his instructions. Nosenko's questioning stopped for a month or two, but it resumed in early 1965.

Langley's security experts worried that neighbors would become suspicious of the parade of automobiles trailing into the Maryland house where Yuri Nosenko was being held in
captivity. So an actual black prison was built at the CIA's Camp Peary training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia. The agency moved the Russian there in the summer of 1965. Nosenko was blindfolded and handcuffed, bundled into a car, then put on a plane for the flight to Camp Peary. Senior CIA officer John L. Hart, reviewing the Nosenko case more than a decade later, found that the prisoner was permitted “fewer amenities than he would have received in most jails or prisons within the United States.”
⁷
That was correct. Nosenko was given nothing to read, no access to radio or television, was not even allowed outside to exercise until much later—and then for no more than a half hour a day. Food was porridge.

Interrogators stopped just short of physical torture, but employed many of the coercive techniques that proved so controversial in the war on terrorism. Agency officers asked to use truth drugs but were denied permission, although whether or not such drugs were in fact administered is disputed. The Hart review concluded that four kinds of drugs had been used on Nosenko. Langley's scientists and security experts had experimented with drugs, including LSD, in the 1950s, and the effort had notoriously led to the death of a participant. It seems reasonable to suppose CIA officials would be loath to permit the use of drugs a decade later. Pete Bagley takes umbrage at charges Nosenko had been put in a “dungeon” or subjected to a “torture vault.” Bagley later wrote the critics “must have been aware that Nosenko had regular (as I remember, weekly) visits by a doctor to ascertain his health and the adequacy of his diet.”
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In August 1966 Dick Helms, now CIA director, renewed his demand that the case be closed. Helms set a two-month deadline. The director felt the agency would not be able to withstand the congressional and media scrutiny when it emerged that “we had held him in these circumstances and in what would be interpreted as outright defiance of law and
custom.”
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Nosenko's treatment included a false arrest (the CIA has no arrest powers—and his “crime” was simply lying to debriefers), false imprisonment, the operation of a CIA prison facility, solitary confinement during the entire period of incarceration, extended (twenty-four-plus-hour) interrogations, and the inducement of psychological stress plus sensory deprivation. Agency officers speculated about discrediting Nosenko, putting him in a psychiatric hospital, even eliminating him.

Soviet Division chief David Murphy persuaded Director Helms to extend his deadline through the end of the year. Nosenko was given another polygraph exam purely to rattle him, with bells and lights controlled from outside the room and sounded or lit to startle the detainee. The inquisitors followed up with a marathon interrogation session. But then questioning largely stopped. CIA focused on interpreting the data it already had. In all, between Nosenko's incarceration and release he was confined for 1,277 days and interrogated on 292 of them. Pete Bagley compiled a massive analysis designed to document Nosenko's perfidy, concluding he was a deception agent. Within weeks of its filing, a reports officer in the Soviet Division filed a rejoinder out of channels to Helms that took apart Bagley's study. It was only now that handlers began allowing Nosenko to walk outside his prison.

Eventually Helms asked his deputy, Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, to look into the whole affair. Taylor started wheels rolling that ultimately freed Nosenko. James Angleton opposed the move, but Helms overruled him—one of the few times those two ever disagreed. In October 1967 the Soviet Division was taken off the case. Nosenko was transferred to custody of the CIA Office of Security, which abandoned hostile interrogations in favor of friendly debriefings. Osborn's unit moved Nosenko out of the black prison. He passed a polygraph held under better-controlled conditions in 1968. The Office of Security did its own review and decided the
Russian was a legitimate defector. The CIA Office of Security actually looks good, in contrast to its showing on some other Family Jewels, professing itself increasingly concerned with the illegality of CIA's holding a defector under these conditions. Meanwhile, the CIA Inspector General issued a survey of the Soviet Division in May 1968 that confirmed the unit was being ripped apart by the controversy over Nosenko. On October 4, 1968, Vice Admiral Taylor concluded that there was no reason to believe “that Nosenko is other than what he claimed to be.”
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Taylor's memorandum shows the FBI used Nosenko's information to open or develop nine different espionage cases.

Helms assembled the constellation of officials concerned with this matter later that month and again in January 1969, finally ruling that Nosenko should be released and even given a contract as a CIA consultant. Freed in March 1969, Nosenko was eventually given a $150,000 settlement ($953,000 in 2012 dollars) by the CIA, and he became a consultant both to Langley and the FBI. But Helms told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that he had never reached
any
final conclusion on Nosenko's bona fides or signed a document containing such a judgment.
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Indeed, in 1975 James Angleton, by then in retirement, gave the Rockefeller Commission a paper baldly asserting that the question of Nosenko's bona fides “has been permitted to fester without any authoritative conclusion because it is an interagency problem affecting other Soviet Bloc cases which are controlled elsewhere in the community.”
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This is not the place for a detailed recitation of the mole hunt of which the Nosenko case formed a part. The hunt generated mountains of paper at Langley, both within Angleton's staff and the Soviet Division. Interested readers may follow the affair in the substantial literature that has developed around it.
¹³
Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner comments, “After reading the Hart study of
Nosenko and thoroughly studying the CIA's involvement in drug testing, I realized how far dedicated but unsupervised people could go wrong in the name of doing good intelligence work.”
¹⁴
In 1978 Nosenko himself, John Hart, and Helms testified on the matter before the House assassinations committee. Nosenko also gave his views on the KGB and Lee Harvey Oswald—an angle about which CIA had been remarkably reticent when the Warren Commission conducted its original investigation.

In an April 1978 order, CIA Director Stansfield Turner overruled his Directorate of Administration (what is today the Directorate of Support) to order inclusion of the Nosenko case in training top CIA managers. Admiral Turner instructed, “If you and I don't take every precaution to ensure that [something like Nosenko] doesn't happen again, we could be endangering the Agency's future.”
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In the heat of today's controversies, there are no doubt CIA people who wish they had had a management attitude like this. One lesson of the Nosenko Family Jewel is that activities that involve abuse are not merely disturbing to the public. Intelligence officers are conscientious people and have their own feelings on morals and appropriate behavior. Contentious operations create disputes within the agency, not just outside it. Both winners and losers in these power struggles may become sources of leaks that breach secrecy and reveal Family Jewels. The
character
of an intelligence operation bears its own consequences.

The lesson the denizens of Langley chose to learn from Nosenko was different: that if hard measures are to be used, best to do so beyond the reach of U.S. law. Thus in the war on terror the CIA secret prisons were created
outside
the United States in part to avoid the legal complications that bedeviled Langley in the Nosenko affair. But the spooks missed another point: the KU/Bark Manual actually did not go far enough—it is the
use
of coercion, not whether it is authorized, that
creates jeopardy, and that jeopardy extends beyond the CIA to implicate the entire United States government, indeed the nation itself. The war on terror would make that abundantly clear.

Another lesson came during Bill Clinton's presidency. This time the scene moved to Guatemala, and the precept was that vulnerability could result even from the acts of others, allies in the CIA enterprise. Guatemala had long been the locale for armed conflict. The covert operation the CIA had sponsored there in 1954 to overthrow the elected government had not introduced stability. The CIA-backed leader would be assassinated in 1957, followed by decades of coups or attempted coups, disputed elections, or other ones coupled with right-wing violence. In the late 1960s the “White Hand,” a shadowy network of rightist militants, began to disappear liberal and populist figures. When conservative governments held sway, the militant network morphed into government death squads. A succession of leftist or peasant guerrilla organizations emerged to oppose the Guatemalan regime. The troubles were not exactly a civil war; they amounted more nearly to a government effort to suppress indigenous Indians. The peasantry defended itself with what arms it could. There was never any possibility the resistance might defeat the oligarchs. But there also seemed no chance the government could overcome the rebellion. Settlement talks were underway by the early 1990s. Factions across the political spectrum attempted to influence the process through violence, with the clear advantage in the hands of right-wing elements allied with the military. Ever on the lookout for communist insurgencies, the Central Intelligence Agency wondered about the Guatemalan rebellion. Drug trafficking had also become a CIA interest and Guatemala a waypoint on the cocaine road into the United States. The agency forged
close links with Guatemalan security forces. Those links led to the CIA's problem.