Tennent Harrington "Pete" Bagley (November 11, 1925 – February 20, 2014) was a CIA operations and counterintelligence officer who worked against the KGB during the Cold War. He is best known for having been, from June 1962 to August 1967, the principal case officer and 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-a-half years he lived in the USSR.

Early life and education Bagley was born November 11, 1925, in Annapolis, Maryland to a prominent United States Navy family. 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. His great uncle was Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy. 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. Bagley joined the CIA in 1950, and his first posting was to the CIA station in Vienna, Austria.

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. 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. While in Bern, he was in communication with Polish KGB officer Michael Goleniewski, and helped him defect to the U.S. in January 1961. 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 the Soviet Russia Division, the Counterintelligence Staff, and KGB defectors Peter Deriabin and Anatoliy Golitsyn and others, Bagley became convinced by the time he retired from the Agency that the CIA and the FBI had been seriously penetrated by Soviet intelligence. He was certain that Pyotr Semyonovich Popov had been betrayed in early 1957 by one or two never-uncovered “moles” in the CIA, and that Oleg Penkovsky had been betrayed within two weeks of his CIA and MI6 recruitment. He was sure that two Soviet intelligence officers who had volunteered to spy for the FBI's NYC field office in the early 1960s -- Aleksei Kulak Fedora (KGB agent) and Dmitri Polyakov) -- were Kremlin-loyal triple agents. Most importantly, Bagley was convinced that KGB defector Yuri Nosenko had been sent to the CIA in Geneva in 1962 to discredit what a recent defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton about possible penetrations of US Intelligence and the intelligence services of America's NATO allies. Bagley was also convinced that KGB Major Igor Kochnov (aka Igor Kozlov) was dispatched to the CIA in 1966 to boost Nosenko's bona fides, to protect the moles from being uncovered, and to arrange for the eventual kidnapping of Nicholas Shadrin in Vienna in 1975. In 1994, Bagley befriended former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev who informed him that Polyakov had been arrested and executed in the 1980s because he had started telling the CIA more than he was supposed to. Bagley writes in his 2014 article "Ghosts of the Spy Wars" that he also learned from Kondrashev that the KGB had recruited in 1949 a never-uncovered U.S. Army code clerk, "JACK," whom Bagley says may have unintentionally started the Korean War.

His Involvement with Nosenko Yuri Nosenko was a putative KGB officer 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 worth of "desperately needed" Swiss francs. Two days later, Russia-born CIA officer George Kisevalter flew in from the U.S. to help Russian-speaking Bagley interview Nosenko during four more meetings. 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 CIA's spy, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, had been uncovered by KGB surveillance in 1959 when an American diplomat by the name of George Winters was spotted mailing a letter to him. Nosenko also told Bagley and Kisevalter that the KGB had developed special chemicals which allowed it to track people and letters. Bagley initially believed 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, had told James Angleton six months before. Bagley realized that what Nosenko had told himself and Kisevalter in Geneva had strangely overlapped (and contradicted) the same cases that Golitsyn had told Angleton about even though Nosenko claimed to have worked in a different part of the highly compartmentalized KGB than Golitsyn.

Although Bagley, his boss David E. Murphy, James Angleton and 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. 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 by Bruce Solie in the Office of Security to a more comfortable safe house in 1967, "cleared" in October 1968 by Solie via what Bagley called a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report, released-with-supervision in 1969, resettled as an American citizen under a different name (George M. Rosnek), financially compensated for his troubles, and employed as a consultant and lecturer by the agency. Bagley wrote that during his incarceration, Nosenko had been subjected to polygraph exams, harsh (but not tortuous) interrogation sessions, 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. in February 1964, 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 to himself ...

If I admit that I wasn't watching [Embassy security officer John] Abidian, 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.

The "Zepp" Incident Nosenko volunteered to Bagley and Kisevalter in June 1962 that the KGB had developed such high-quality listening devices that an electronic "bug" built into an ashtray or a vase was 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, 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, and that in June 1962 Nosenko was "fishing" for the identity of the (nonexistent) mole "Zepp" in Soviet intelligence.

Lee Harvey Oswald British researcher Malcolm J. J. Blunt befriended Bagley in 2008 and showed him some CIA documents he hadn't been privy to in 1959-1960. Some of them indicated that the incoming non-CIA cables on Lee Harvey Oswald's October 1959 defection to the USSR had been routed to Bruce Leonard Solie's mole-hunting office in the Office of Security rather than to where they would normally go, the Soviet Russia Division. Since this change in routing had to be arranged in advance with the Mail Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics, Bagley told Blunt that Oswald must have been a "witting" (i.e., false) defector.

Popov Case