Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko (; October 30, 1927 – August 23, 2008) was a KGB officer who allegedly defected to the United States in 1964. Controversy arose over whether he was a genuine defector or a KGB "plant." As a result, he was detained by the CIA for over three years. Eventually, he was deemed a true defector. After his release, he became an American citizen and worked as a consultant and lecturer for the CIA.
Life prior to defection Nosenko was born on 30 October 1927 in Nikolayev, Soviet Ukraine. His father, Ivan Nosenko, was the USSR’s Minister of Shipbuilding from 1940 to 1946 and again from 1954 until his death in 1956. During the Second World War, Nosenko and his mother were evacuated from Moscow to Chelyabinsk. Nosenko made several attempts to return to Moscow during this period, escapades which the CIA would later view as the beginning of a pattern of insubordination which would culminate in his defection. From 1941–1943 and from 1944–1945, he attended the Leningrad-based Frunze Naval Preparatory School, but had to leave after an injury. His father secured him a posting to a shipbuilding college, enabling Nosenko to follow his father into shipbuilding. After the war, he enrolled at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, graduating in 1950. Nosenko had two brief, unsuccessful marriages in 1946 and 1947, the second of which produced a child which he insisted was not his.
In 1951, he entered Soviet naval intelligence as an English translator. Using connections made by his parents, he was able to transfer to the MGB in early 1953, at the recommendation of Bogdan Kobulov, whom he never met. Within the MGB, which became the KGB after Stalin's death, he primarily worked in the Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for counterintelligence and internal security. In June 1953, he married his third wife, Lyudmila Yulianovna Khozhevnikova, a student at the Moscow State University. They would have two children prior to his defection. Nosenko, who joined the Komsomol in 1943, served as secretary of the Second Chief Directorate's Komsomol chapter. However, after he misused his KGB alias to receive treatment for a venereal disease in 1954, he was expelled from the Komsomol and professionally reprimanded. Despite this, he managed to keep his job. He received a poor performance report in 1955, and began to suffer from the effects of alcoholism. His mother intervened to have him transferred to a different section of the Second Chief Directorate, where he befriended the Directorate's Chief, Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov. Through a combination of his parents' status and this friendship, he was able to again be promoted professionally, managing to join the Communist Party in 1957 and being promoted to the rank of Captain in December 1959. From July 1962 until his defection, he served as deputy Chief of the Seventh Department of the Second Chief Directorate, a subsection targeting American tourists in the USSR. In this position, he was sent on several temporary duty assignments abroad, including to England (twice), Cuba, Geneva, and Bulgaria. He would defect during his second temporary duty assignments to Geneva, which began on 18 January 1964.
Defection The following annotated passage is taken verbatim from a declassified CIA document referencing Nosenko's defection and subsequent treatment.
The official CIA account by the Office of Security differs significantly from the version provided by Nosenko's case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, who handled his case from mid-June 1962 to late October 1967. In his 1978 HSCA testimony, his 2007 book Spy Wars, and his 2014 follow-up PDF Ghosts of the Spy Wars, Bagley claimed that Nosenko, unwilling to leave his beloved wife and two daughters behind in Moscow, "defected in place" to the CIA in late May 1962. He further asserted that none of the leads Nosenko provided to the CIA identified Soviet assets who (1) had current access to NATO governmental secrets, (2) were actively cooperating with Soviet intelligence at the time, and (3) had previously been unsuspected by Western counterintelligence agencies.
In late May 1962 (according to Bagley, though some sources suggest early June), Nosenko contacted the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, about two months after accompanying an arms-control delegation to the city as its ostensible security officer. He met one-on-one with Bagley at a Geneva safe house and offered his services to the CIA in exchange for approximately $250 worth of Swiss francs. He explained that he had spent the money on "wine, women, and song" and needed to replenish it, as it was an unauthorized expenditure of KGB funds that he would soon have to account for with his superiors.
Nosenko told Bagley that he was a major in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate (now part of the FSB). He claimed that until recently, he had served as the deputy chief of the KGB department targeting the American Embassy in Moscow and was now the head of the department responsible for monitoring and attempting to recruit American and British tourists in the USSR. He provided some information that could only have been known by someone connected to the KGB, and Bagley assured him that he would receive the requested money at their next meeting.
Nosenko volunteered that he did not want to leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow and, therefore, would never defect to the West. However, he promised to reestablish contact with the CIA whenever he was permitted to travel outside the USSR, emphasizing that he did not want to be approached inside the Soviet Union.
As he was leaving, Nosenko mentioned that he knew how the CIA’s spy, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, had been caught. However, he said he did not have enough time to share the details at that moment and would provide them "next time."
Nosenko, who spoke English, met one-on-one with Bagley, who understood Russian, during their first meeting. For the remaining four meetings, he was joined by Bagley and Russian-born George Kisevalter.
During the second meeting, Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov had been caught due to superior KGB surveillance in Moscow. He claimed that an American diplomat, George Winters, had been observed mailing a letter to Popov, leading to his arrest.
Nosenko returned to Moscow with the delegation in mid-June, while Bagley and Kisevalter flew separately to CIA Headquarters—each carrying copies of the tape recordings and each other's notes.
In late January 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a former Marine who had lived in the USSR for two and a half years, Nosenko once again accompanied the delegation to Geneva and reestablished contact with Bagley and Kisevalter.
He shocked them by claiming that he had been the case officer for the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. A few days later, he nervously informed them that he had received a telegram from Moscow ordering his immediate return. He interpreted this as a sign that the Kremlin had discovered his espionage for the CIA. Believing his life to be in danger, he expressed his urgent desire to defect to the United States immediately, despite knowing it would mean leaving his wife and daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves.
Regarding the recall telegram Nosenko claimed to have received from KGB headquarters, the CIA later determined that no such message had been sent. Nosenko eventually admitted that he had fabricated the story to persuade the CIA to accept his request to defect to the United States.
Lee Harvey Oswald Nosenko claimed that he had supervised the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, which had been collated when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. He told the CIA that "it was decided that Oswald was of no interest whatsoever, so the KGB recommended that he go home to the United States", and of his wife, Marina Oswald, he said that "she already had anti-Soviet characteristics. She was not too smart anyway and not an educated person.....The Soviets were glad to get rid of them both". He offered to testify to this before the Warren Commission, which was in the process of investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However some within the CIA, such as Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, suspected at the time that Nosenko was a fake defector. He was therefore not permitted to do so. However, in 1978, Nosenko testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), when he testified that Oswald "wasn't considered an interesting target" by the Soviet government.
Concerns that Nosenko was a triple agent By mid-1964, the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division (formerly the Soviet Russia Division) strongly suspected that Nosenko was a KGB plant for several reasons. One major concern was that he had lied twice about his rank and had even provided an official KGB document to support his second lie.
Additionally, Anatoliy Golitsyn had warned that the KGB would soon send someone like Nosenko to discredit him. This warning seemed to be fulfilled in the eyes of Bagley and James Angleton when Bagley reviewed Golitsyn’s extensive file at CIA headquarters. He realized that everything Nosenko had told Kisevalter and himself in Geneva about specific Soviet penetrations of NATO intelligence services either contradicted or minimized what Golitsyn had already revealed to Angleton. This was especially suspicious given that Golitsyn and Nosenko had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB.
About a month after Nosenko arrived in the U.S., Bagley took him on a two-week vacation to Hawaii. When they returned to Washington, Nosenko—who had not cooperated with the CIA's interviewers up to that point—was detained in a Washington-area "safe house." There, he was administered a polygraph exam, subjected to interrogations, and from 1965 to 1967, endured increasingly harsh interrogations and conditions. These included being held in a purpose-built, bunker-like safe house, as part of an operation approved by CIA Director John A. McCone.
Although Nosenko fell into a trance-like state and came close to "breaking" at one point, he never actually did.
The situation became even more complicated when a KGB informant to the FBI's New York City field office, Alexey Kulak, confirmed that Nosenko was a lieutenant colonel. However, it was later revealed that Nosenko, by his own admission, was actually only a captain. At that point, the Nosenko issue evolved into an inter-service confrontation. The CIA’s Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division considered Nosenko a false defector, while the FBI, largely based on information from Kulak and another KGB informant, Dmitri Polyakov (Top Hat), accepted him as genuine.
According to Bagley, Polyakov did begin spying for the CIA after leaving his post at the U.N. in New York City and being reassigned to Burma, Moscow, and India. However, he was eventually caught by the KGB in Moscow and executed.
Nosenko underwent three polygraph exams administered by the CIA: two by the Soviet Russia Division/Soviet Bloc Division (in 1964 and 1966), and one by Bruce Solie of the Office of Security in 1968. The results of the 1964 and 1966 exams suggested that Nosenko was lying, while the 1968 exam seemed to indicate that he was telling the truth. All three exams were extensively analyzed by external polygraph expert Richard O. Arther, who concluded in a ten-page report to the HSCA that the 1966 exam was the most reliable of the three.