Tennent Harrington Bagley (November 11, 1925 – February 20, 2014) was a high-level CIA counterintelligence officer who worked against the KGB during the Cold War. He is best known for having been the case officer and principal interrogator of controversial KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who claimed a couple of months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that the KGB had nothing to do with the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, during the two-and-one-half years Oswald lived in the USSR.

Bagley, who never believed the Soviets were behind the assassination of JFK, initially thought Nosenko was a true defector after meeting with him five times in Geneva, Switzerland, in May and June 1962, but, while reading the file of an earlier defector at CIA headquarters about a week later, he became convinced that Nosenko had been dispatched to the CIA to discredit what that earlier defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling the agency.^[1][2][3][4]

Early life and education

Bagley was born November 11, 1925, in Annapolis, Maryland to a prominent United States Navy family.^[5] His parents were then-Commander David W. Bagley and his wife, Marie Louise (Harrington) Bagley. He had two siblings, David H. Bagley and Worth H. Bagley, both of whom were older than him and destined to become Admirals. Tennent was given the nickname "Pete" by his mother when he was young, and it stuck with him for the rest of his life. Bagley joined the United States Marine Corps in 1942 when he was seventeen and studying at the University of Southern California. He went through the V-12 Navy College Training Program, and during WW II served as a lieutenant in a Marine detachment on an aircraft carrier. After the war, he earned a PhD in political science from the University of Geneva-affiliated Graduate Institute of International Studies.^[6] Bagley joined the CIA in 1950, and his first posting was to the CIA station in Vienna, Austria.^[7]

Career

While posted in Vienna, Austria, Bagley helped the CIA recruit GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, and he helped operations chief William J. Hood exfiltrate KGB Major Peter Deriabin to the U.S.^[8][9] In his 1982 book about the Popov case, Mole: The True Story of the First Russian Intelligence Officer Recruited by the CIA, Hood protected the identities of himself, agent-handler George Kisevalter, and Bagley by changing their names to "Peter Todd," "Gregory Domnin" and "Amos Booth," respectively.^[10] After Vienna, Bagley was posted to the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, from where he ran a CIA program that specialized in recruiting Soviet intelligence officers, diplomats and functionaries in Europe.^[11]

In his 1978 sworn testimony given to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Bagley said he became Chief of CIA's Soviet Russia Division's Counterintelligence section in 1962, and later became Deputy Chief (DC) of the Soviet Bloc Division. In 1967, when it was time for him to be transferred to a post in Europe, he chose to be sent to Brussels, Belgium. He was Chief of Station in Brussels until he chose early retirement in 1972.

Bagley's Analysis of the KGB-CIA War

Based on his own analyses and those of CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, Bagley's subordinates in the Soviet Russia / Soviet Bloc Division, and KGB defectors Peter Deriabin and Anatoliy Golitsyn, Bagley became convinced by mid-1964 that the CIA and the FBI had been seriously penetrated by Soviet intelligence. In particular, he believed that two never-uncovered “moles” in the CIA had betrayed two of its most important spies, Pyotr Semyonovich Popov and Oleg Penkovsky, and that two United Nations-based Soviet intelligence officers who had volunteered to spy for the FBI, Aleksey Kulak (Fedora (KGB Agent)) and Dmitri Polyakov, were Kremlin-loyal triple agents.

Bagley believed that KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had been sent to the CIA in Geneva in late May 1962 to discredit what KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling it about KGB penetrations of U.S. and other NATO countries' intelligence services,^[12][13] and, among other things, that KGB Colonel Igor Kochnov, who had contacted the CIA by calling Richard Helms at home in June 1966, was a triple-agent dispatched to the U.S. to boost the flagging "bona fides" of Nosenko by claiming he'd been sent to the U.S. to try to kidnap or kill both Nosenko and Golitsyn. Bagley also says Kochnov arranged for the eventual kidnapping of CIA agent Nicholas Shadrin in 1975 in Vienna.^[14]

Former Army Intelligence analyst John M. Newman says in his book, "Uncovering Popov's Mole," that Kochnov's contacting Richard Helms just as he was preparing to assume the Directorship of the CIA led Helms to unwittingly protect probable KGB "mole" Bruce Solie from being uncovered by the CIA by having Solie and FBI agent Elbert Turner handle Kochnov.^[15]

The Popov Case

GRU officer Pyotr Semyonovich Popov was recruited by the CIA in 1953 in Vienna. After spying for the agency for seven years in Austria and East Germany, he was publicly arrested in Moscow on October 16, 1959, and executed in 1960.^[16] In his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, mysteries and Deadly Games, Bagley said Popov's treason was probably revealed to the KGB in early 1957 by Popov's former CIA "dead drop" arranger in Moscow and future Hoover Institution scholar, Edward Ellis Smith. Bagley says Smith apparently met with high-level KGB officer Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington, D.C., movie houses after Smith was fired by the Agency (John M. Newman claims Smith was not fired, and that another "mole" in the Office of Security, James W. McCord Jr., arranged for him to be "cleared" of spying for the KGB and to be secretly retained by the CIA).^[17][18]

In his 2014 PDF, Ghosts of the Spy Wars, Bagley speculated that an even higher, never-uncovered "mole" in the CIA must have been involved in the betraying of Popov. Bagley wrote that the KGB, in the interest of protecting Smith and the never-uncovered "mole," allowed Popov to continue spying for the CIA until late 1958, at which time (after Oleg Penkovsky had been "trapped like a bear in its den") he was recalled to Moscow on a ruse, secretly arrested, "played back" against the CIA for a year, publicly arrested in October 1959, and executed in 1960.^{[13] [19]}

The Golienewski Case

In 1960, a Polish intelligence major by the name of Michael Goleniewski tried to warn J. Edgar Hoover about some possible KGB penetrations of U.S. Intelligence by having the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, forward to Hoover a sealed letter he had written. In an explanatory letter to the embassy, Golienewski, writing in German, called himself Heckenschütze (Sniper). Golienewski had decided to try to get the letter to Hoover rather than to the CIA because he believed the Agency had been penetrated by at least one unknown-to-him KGB "mole" who might be able to uncover him.^[20]

The U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, Henry J. Taylor, opened and read the letter, and decided not to forward it to Hoover, but to turn it over to CIA station chief Bagley, who was working "under cover" at the embassy as Second Secretary. Bagley notified CIA headquarters about "Sniper," and then, pretending to be an FBI agent, started corresponding with him in German. About a year later, Bagley was instrumental in recruiting, debriefing, and exfiltrating Golienewski to the U.S.

Due to something Golienewski had written in his correspondence with Bagley, several years later Bagley himself came under suspicion of being a KGB "mole" by CIA counterintelligence analyst Clare Edward Petty. Petty eventually discontinued his investigation of Bagley and switched his attention to his own boss, CIA's chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton.^[21]

The Nosenko Case

Yuri Nosenko was a putative KGB defector who "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in late May, 1962, and in a one-on-one meeting with Bagley in a "safe house" two days later, offered to sell some KGB secrets for $250. Two days after that, Russia-born CIA officer George Kisevalter flew in from the U.S. to help Bagley interview Nosenko during four more meetings.^[22]

According to Bagley (who immediately became Nosenko's primary CIA case officer), one of the things Nosenko told Kisevalter and himself during the second meeting was that a very important CIA spy who was executed in 1960, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, had been uncovered by KGB surveillance in Moscow when an American diplomat by the name of George Winters was spotted mailing a letter to him.^[23] Nosenko also told Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had developed special chemicals which allowed it to track people and letters.^[24]

Nosenko and the "Zepp" Incident

Nosenko volunteered to Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had developed such high-quality listening devices that an electronic "bug" built into an ashtray or a vase had been able to record very clearly a conversation in a Moscow restaurant allegedly between an American Assistant Naval Attaché (Leo J. Dulacki) and an Indonesian military attaché by the name of "Zepp"—a name Bagley didn't know, but had the presence of mind to have Nosenko spell out for him. This incident became critically important later when it was learned that Oleg Penkovsky's Moscow handler, Greville Wynne, had told his British de-briefer after he was released from a Soviet prison that, while incarcerated, the KGB had asked him who "Zepp" was. Bagley learned that when Wynne's KGB interrogator played the Penkovsky-Wynne conversation back to him to "jog his memory," Penkovsky realized that they had been recorded while talking about a London bargirl whose nickname was "Zeph" (short for "Stephanie"), just two weeks after Penkovsky had been recruited by the CIA and MI6 in London. This signified to Bagley that the KGB had become aware of Penkovsky's treason almost immediately, and that the reason it had waited sixteen months to arrest him was because it needed to create a surveillance-based entrapment scenario that wouldn't lead to the uncovering of the highly placed, easy-to-identify mole who had betrayed him.^[25]

More Nosenko

About a week after the fifth and final meeting with Nosenko, Bagley flew to CIA headquarters and, at the suggestion of Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, read the thick file on Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB major who had defected to the U.S. from Helsinki, Finland, six months earlier. In so doing, Bagley became convinced that Nosenko was a false-defector who had been sent to the CIA to discredit what Golitsyn was telling it.^[26]

Although Bagley, James Angleton, Bagley's boss David E. Murphy, Richard Helms and others in the CIA were skeptical of Nosenko's "bona fides," he was permitted to physically defect to the U.S. when he re-contacted Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in early February, 1964, and told them that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's KGB case officer during the two-and-one-half years Oswald lived in the USSR. Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he urgently needed to physically defect to the U.S. because he had just received a telegram from KGB headquarters in Moscow ordering him to return there immediately (NSA looked into this issue a later and determined that such a telegram had never been sent.)

Bagley, not letting on that he believed Nosenko to be a false defector, took him on a two-week vacation to Hawaii about a month after Nosenko arrived in the United States. When they returned to Washington, Nosenko, who had not been cooperating with his CIA interviewers, was incarcerated in a Washington, D. C. "safe house" at the direction of the head of CIA's Soviet Bloc Division, David Murphy, with input from Bagley.^{[27] [28]}

Although Murphy and Bagley detained Nosenko for three years in that safe house and in a new, purpose-built building in another location, they were unable to get him to confess to being a false defector. Nosenko was eventually moved to a more comfortable safe house in 1967, released with supervision in 1969, "cleared" by controversial Security officer Bruce Solie, financially compensated, resettled as an American citizen under a different name (George M. Rosnek), and employed as a consultant and lecturer by the agency.^[29]

During his incarceration, Nosenko had been subjected to polygraph exams, intense interrogation sessions, sleep deprivation, a minimal-but-adequate diet, and Spartan living conditions. Bagley claims in his book "Spy Wars" that during his three-year detainment, Nosenko often contradicted what he had said both in Geneva in 1962 and after his arrival in the U.S., and that when Nosenko was confronted with a particular contradiction which had a bearing on his "legend," he fell into a trance-like state and, while being secretly tape recorded, mumbled self-incriminatingly ...

If I admit that I wasn't watching [Moscow U.S. Embassy security officer John] Abidian [in 1960], then I'd have to admit that I'm not George [Yuri], that I wasn't born in Nikolayev, and that I'm not married.

... and nearly "broke."^[30]

After Bagley was routinely posted to Brussels in late 1967 as the CIA's Chief of Station there, Nosenko was effectively cleared by a polygraph exam given by (and a report written by) a different case officer, the aforementioned Bruce Solie of the mole-hunting Office of Security.

In his 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole, professor and former Army Intelligence analyst John M. Newman, who dedicated his book to Bagley, says Solie was not only probably a KGB mole, but had sent (or duped James Angleton into sending) Lee Harvey Oswald to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA—the Soviet Russia Division.^[31]

Rebuttal to John L. Hart's HSCA testimony

On September 11, 1978, CIA officer John L. Hart, who had written a pro-Nosenko / anti-Bagley report for the CIA regarding the bona fides of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, testified to the HSCA. Nosenko, who had himself recently testified to the HSCA, claimed to have been in charge of Lee Harvey Oswald's KGB file before and after the assassination of President Kennedy, and said that the KGB had had absolutely nothing to do with "abnormal" Oswald in the USSR.

In his testimony, Hart claimed Nosenko was a true defector, and said Nosenko had been misunderstood, mishandled, and/or mistreated by Bagley and Bagley's Soviet Bloc Division colleagues both before and during his three-year incarceration.

On October 11, 1978, Bagley sent a letter to G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director to the HSCA, in which he rebutted Hart and requested permission to testify. Bagley gave lengthy testimony to the HSCA on November 16, 1978.^[32] In the transcript of Bagley's testimony, he is not identified by name, but is referred to instead as "Deputy Chief S.B. Division" and "Mr. D.C." because he had been the deputy chief of CIA's Soviet Bloc Division / Soviet Russia Division.

Reactions to his Spy Wars book

Several reviews and analyses, both positive and negative, have been published either online or in hard-copy about Bagley's conclusions in his book, "Spy Wars".

Some positive reviews are those by David Ignatius,^[33] Ron Rosenbaum,^[34] Evan Thomas,^[35] and former CIA officer W. Alan Messer in his 27-page online article "In Pursuit of the Squared Circle".^[36]

Examples of negative ones are those by former Soviet intelligence officers Boris Volodarsky and Oleg Gordievsky, ^[37] and former CIA officers Leonard V. McCoy,^[38] Cleveland Cram,^[39] and Richards Heuer in his online essay, "Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgement".

In popular culture

In the 1986 American–British television drama produced by the BBC, "Yuri Nosenko: Double Agent," Bagley's character is played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Since Bagley was Nosenko's case manager and chief interrogator, his character is hard to pick out (if he's there at all) in the scenes depicting the "tortuous interrogation" of the Nosenko character in the fictionalized film about James Angleton, The Good Shepherd. The character yelling at Nosenko and torturing him with water is someone who in reality didn't participate in the interrogations, counterintelligence chief James Angleton's right-hand-man, Raymond G. Rocca (whose son, Gordon Rocca, married Bagley's daughter, Christina).^[40]

Bagley's 2007 book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games," is free-to-read on the Internet^[12] as is his 2014 follow-up PDF, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars: A Personal Reminder to Interested Parties".^[13]

Personal life

Bagley married a young Hungarian woman, Maria Lonyay in the early 1950s in Vienna. They moved from the U.S. to Brussels, Belgium, when Bagley was transferred there in 1972, and remained there after he retired from the CIA. They had three children, Andrew, Christina, and Patricia.^[6] Bagley wrote or co-wrote three books on the CIA and the KGB. He was a student of the Battle of Waterloo and an avid bird watcher.

References

Bibliography