The death of Yuri Nosenko, and the search for truth.
By ELLIOT JAGERnosenko 88(photo credit: )
News of Yuri Nosenko's death at 81, on August 23, place unknown, was recently - belatedly - made public. He had been living under an assumed name, and chances are that most of his acquaintances, maybe even his family, didn't know he had been a Soviet defector; and that US intelligence once thought him the key to connecting the Kremlin to the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.
Codenamed Foxtrot, Nosenko was a Central Intelligence Agency mole inside the KGB. He sold himself to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962, when he was a member of the Soviet Union's disarmament delegation. Nosenko needed money, he told the Americans, to repay funds he had misappropriated from the KGB and spent on alcohol, prostitutes and asthma medicine for his daughter in Moscow.
Over the years he provided priceless material. According to his obituary in The New York Times, "He gave his American handlers vital information about Soviet agents who had penetrated American and European embassies and about microphones that Russians had planted in the US Embassy in Moscow."
In the wake of JFK's murder on November 23, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, Nosenko assured his handlers that, having read the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, he could confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the assassin had not acted on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The dysfunctional Oswald, you may recall, had defected to communist Russia, living there from 1959 to 1962, when he returned to the States with a Russian wife and child.
The idea that a nobody like Oswald, acting on his own, could so change the course of history was hard to fathom. Surely he was just a cog in an intricate - and still secret - conspiracy?
In January 1964, against the CIA's wishes, Nosenko defected, claiming he feared that the KGB was onto him. He was brought to the US for debriefing.
I FIRST read Nosenko's riveting story in Edward J. Epstein's Legend, and was fascinated that Nosenko was never allowed to testify before the Warren Commission investigating JFK's assassination.
The explanation had to do with James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence (and also, purely by coincidence, for many years the agency's liaison to Israeli intelligence).
Angleton obsessed over the possibility that Nosenko's defection was part of an elaborate KGB plot to cover up Soviet involvement in the assassination. Angleton had earlier helped unmask Kim Philby, once his close personal friend, as a Soviet mole inside British intelligence.
The more Angleton delved into Nosenko's story, the more contradictions he turned up. He became increasingly convinced that Nosenko could be a false defector sent by the KGB to muddy the waters.
First, Nosenko said he could not defect and leave his wife and children behind; then, suddenly, he did. Much of what he told his debriefers about his education, KGB rank and personal history was lies. The truth was that as a Russian spy, he was mostly a flop. Fortunately for him, however, his family was part of the nomenklatura - that small, elite subset of the Soviet population that went to the best schools, got the best jobs and had the best connections.
Angleton could not bring himself to believe that all Nosenko really wanted was what he claimed: simply to breathe the free air of the West. So Nosenko was secretly imprisoned, deprived of sleep, interrogated without let-up, minimally fed, isolated from the world in a tiny cell, forbidden to read and given one lie-detector test after another.
This went on for three years. Nosenko did not change his story.
Finally, in 1968, the CIA accepted that he was the genuine article and set him up with money and a new identity.
It's said he was not bitter about his treatment; that he eventually remarried, and was from time to time brought to CIA headquarters outside Washington, where his lectures on tradecraft were warmly received. Shortly before his death, the CIA awarded Yuri Nosenko a special certificate of appreciation.
Incidentally, I refer readers to Gerald Posner's seminal Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK for the definitive debunking of the various conspiracy theories out there.
ANGLETON, who died in 1987 aged 69, was himself a fascinating figure. In Cold Warrior, Tom Mangold tells us that Angleton was a man of obsessions. He was addicted to booze and cigarettes, introverted, naturally secretive, dogmatic and a workaholic. While he loved opera and films, he preferred hobbies he could indulge in alone: crafts, orchid-breeding, fishing.
I imagine him as the archetype of John LeCarre's donnish, slightly stooped, bespectacled George Smiley, the British spymaster who hunted moles inside MI5 in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of LeCarre's goals at the outset of his career, it seems to me, was to promote the view that in trying to understand the complex world of politics and espionage, one should search for shades of gray, not black and white.
Sadly for this fan, LeCarre's measured take on spies and politics came to be replaced by a full-throttle moral relativism and a very deep hatred of America. In effect, the novelist became indistinguishable from the Jim Haydon character he created. Or had I been misreading him, and that was who he was all along?
THE NEWS of Nosenko's death reminded me why I had once been so enthralled by spies - real and fictitious: Their narratives serve as a metaphor for understanding life as a plot, with a beginning, middle and end; the occasional betrayal and then the denouement.
In trying to unmask Nosenko by connecting Oswald to the KGB, or by arguing that Yugoslavia's Tito had never really broken with Stalin, or that the Russia-China split might have been staged, Angleton was trying to identify order in a chaotic world.
To reveal life's coherent story line - where truth could be ascertained, mysteries unraveled, motives deconstructed and context provided, an Angleton or a Smiley made their way through a hall of mirrors, wading through reams of disinformation in order to identify the good and bad guys.
The alternative system of ideas is to believe that there is no universal truth - no "plot" - and, consequently, no basis for moral values. It's the antithesis of the way we Jews strive to understand the world.
This dichotomy between coherence and the lack of it forces many people to choose either moral relavatism or certainty in absolute truth. The relativist argues that moral values have no underpinning. The absolutist insists that truth is accessible - especially if you subscribe to the right creed.
In Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, philosopher Simon Blackburn offers this good advice: "We should not be slaves of simplistic relativisms, or of equally simplistic absolutisms."
In remembering Yuri Nosenko's life and James Angleton's frustrated efforts to make sense of it, I confess to retaining an admiration for Angleton, his wrongheaded paranoia notwithstanding.
As my "rebbe," M. Scott Peck, taught, it is the search for the plot - and not its unraveling - that gives life its meaning.
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