Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games

By Tennent H. Bagley and H. Bagley Tennent

Book Overview

Chosen by William Safire in the New York Times to be the publishing sleeper-seller of the year for 2007
In this rapid-paced book, a former CIA chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence breaks open the mysterious case of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko's 1964 defection to the United States. Still a highly controversial chapter in the history of Cold War espionage, the Nosenko affair has inspired debate for more than forty years: was Nosenko a bona fide defector with the real information about Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in Soviet Russia, or was he a KGB loyalist, engaged in a complex game of deception?
As supervisor of CIA operations against the KGB at the time, Tennent H. Bagley directly handled Nosenko's case. This insider knowledge, combined with information gleaned from dozens of interviews with former KGB adversaries, places Bagley in a uniquely authoritative position. He guides the reader step by step through the complicated operations surrounding the Nosenko affair and shatters the comfortable version of events the CIA has presented to the public. Bagley unveils not only the KGB's history of merciless and bloody betrayals but also the existence of undiscovered traitors in the American camp. Shining new light on the CIA-KGB spy wars, he invites deeper thinking about the history of espionage and its implications for the intelligence community today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300136242
• ISBN13: 9780300136241
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Serious Important Book

While this book is likely not written for the general public , in my opinion it is one of the most important books written in the past few years. I also am a former intelligence officer . I had a number of dealings with James Angleton during my 20 plus years of service. The numermous allegations that Angleton was paranoid constituted total nonsense. The fact that Pete Bagley and Jim Angleton who served the the people of america so honorably were so denigrated not only by the media but in some cases by their former collegues is shameful . The facts that Mr. Bagley has documented in this book should , in my opinion , be the basis for a blue ribbon commission to ascertain the true state of affairs. The American public and for that matter the world public needs to know more about assassination as a tool of statecraft as practiced by the Soviet Union's KGB .

Maximum Counterintelligence

I am a former counterintelligence officer and subject to the vestiges of the professional parinoia that is one of the occupational hazards of the field. That said, the Nosenko case, so well discribed by Mr. Bagley, still stinks. The CIA is a government bureaucracy that is even more inclined to labor under the burden of "group-think" than the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other large governmental or corporate organization. That is why the managment of the CIA wants everybody on board with the party line: Nosenko is the McCoy, the real deal. Nosenko was a plant. The incriminating information that he revealed came before he was sequestered in Virginia. Mr. Bagley claims that the CIA Soviet Bloc (SB) branch had a legal go-ahead from high officials in the administration, the Atty. Gen. for example,to keep Nosenko under wraps. The rehabilitation of Nosenko had more to do with covering up ineptitude than any evidence that would clear up questions about Nosenko's validity. In Legacy of Ashes the author points out that many spies, traitors and moles were revealed by Nosenko. Mr. Bagely refutes this. Who were they, the exposed? Surely now someone can come forward with these names. Nosenko is an adventurer who got to play on the big stage. His efforts to convice the CIA that the communist (Oswald) that shot JFK was not working for, with or had any connection with the chief organ of the Soviet communist party whatsoever. The House Committee on Assasinations was convinced that Nosenko was lying. This is not to say that there was any connection to the murder but it is safe to say that the Soviets truly wanted the US to believe that there was none. During his extensive interviews, Nosenko was asked simple questions: what elevator did you take to your floor, how were secretaries assigned,what is your KGB rank, what did they serve in the lunch room and other seemingly mundane quesions? He could not provide answers. I can still remember the layout of each office that I occupied and that was over 30 years ago. Nosenko was poorly briefed. The KGB hoped that we would focus on the things that they wanted us to know not the trivia that would make or break Nosenko's bona fides. Nobody is perfect. It is the simple things that trip you up when you lie. One thing that Mr. Bagely missed when he talked about other, non-Soviet, operations was that during the deception operation being run against the Germans in WW 2 leading up to the Normandy landings, the Brits dropped agents into occupied France that they knew would be captured and tortured. They had been given scraps of information that conformed to what the German high command wanted to believe: the invasion would be north of the Seine near Calais. That, gentle reader, is cold. So, it is no great reach to suspect the Soviets from doing the same kind of thing. One way to deal with this would be to have aspiring CIA officers listen to a debate on the Nosenko issue, having both sides make present

The Plot thickens

In this well written and fast-paced book Bagley, while narrating a mystery-filled spy case, deals with a timely question: how and why intelligence and counterintelligence information can be suppressed and distorted to serve political or other agendas, to the detriment of the national interest. It serves as a warning to decision makers of the pitfalls of wishful thinking and self protection. The book uses the case of the Soviet KGB defector Yuri Nosenko to unveil a fascinating, hidden world of Soviet deception. In this still unresolved affair the CIA finally decided that Nosenko was a genuine defector and served the interests of the United States. This position, finally adopted by the Agency's "cool heads." used false information that is exposed in this book. Bagley gives solid reasons to think the position is wrong and that the KGB sent Nosenko to CIA as a provocateur. Most important, he reveals for the first time what lay behind this KGB deception game: moles in CIA and even more dangerous, Soviet breaking of American secret ciphers--never uncovered to this day.. The Nosenko case developed into a gigantic and sometimes rather dirty fight within the CIA. In the end the "cool heads" prevailed. William Colby, after becoming CIA Director, fired the counterintelligence staff chief James Angleton and closed the debate. But did it really end? After the Cold War Bagley went out on his own and turned up new evidence from KGB veterans, and his carefully researched and utterly convincing book is likely to reopen the issue. This is an important historical document which will be widely read and long debated.

Chilling Account of Deception

This outstanding work by a key figure at the center of the Nosenko-Golitsyn-Angleton controversy, and alongside Edward Jay Espstein's work (which was based in part on conversations with Angleton before the latter's death), finally gives us the inside story of the dual defectors, and supplies a long-overdue corrective to the work of Mangold and Wise in their early-1990s biographies of Angleton. The truths set forth by Bagaley shoud be incorporated into the standard history of Cold War counter-espionage as well as the JFK assasination.

So Fascinating It Makes Your Head Hurt

In 1962 in Geneva a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko contacted the CIA to supply them with information about KGB operations, before returning to the Soviet Union. In the beginning of 1964, Nosenko unexpectedly surfaced again in the West and re-contacted the CIA. This time he told the Americans that he had had charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had assassinated John F. Kennedy only a couple of months before. This time, Nosenko wished to remain in the West. With bait like first-hand knowledge of the Oswald file, who could resist? But more than four decades later, the basic question remains a matter of controversy: Was Yuri Nosenko a genuine defector or was he a KGB plant? Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the author of the present book, was the first CIA case officer to handle Nosenko and in the early and mid-Sixties he participated in intense interrogations and investigations of the supposed defector. And forty years later, Bagley remains convinced that Nosenko was a fraud, even though the official position of the CIA for many years has been that the man was a genuine defector. If what Bagley states in "Spy Wars" about Nosenko's claims is true, then the only reasonable conclusion would seem to be that Nosenko was indeed a liar (and a not particularly good liar) but, as Bagley points out, the CIA (and many other organizations) is willing to deceive itself when the alternative is painful or embarrassing (and if Nosenko was indeed accepted to be a false defector, that conclusion would be very painful and embarrassing for the CIA which has publically embraced the former Soviet officer). There seem to be three possible general conclusions to be drawn about Nosenko: (1) he was a genuine defector whose story became confused only because of the stress of the situation (a conclusion difficult to accept in light of Bagley's revelations); (2) he was a genuine, but low-level defector who lied to make himself appear to be a much bigger fish, or (3) Nosenko's "defection" was a Soviet disinformation ploy, perhaps to protect moles and successful KGB penetrations of American cypher traffic. Bagley clearly favors the third conclusion and in essence provides an explanation of why this supposed defector appeared to be ill-prepared to successfully lie about many crucial areas. Bagley evidently believes that Nosenko was a low-level KGB operative (perhaps with a criminal background) who was being prepared for a false defection to cover real Soviet espionage successes when in the wake of the JFK Assassination, the KGB was forced to quickly revise Nosenko's story and dispatch him again to the West with "proof" that Oswald had no ties to the KGB (by the way, Bagley does not contend that the KGB played any role in the JFK Assassination, only that the Nosenko affair provided them with a temptizingly convenient way of placing a greater distance between themselves and the killing). I have been interested in the Nosenko case for about thirty years, and had suppos