Speaker 1: Thinking sideways. I don't under see it. You never know
Speaker 1: the stories of things. We simply don't know the answer too. Well.
Speaker 1: Hi there, this is thinking sideways and I'm Joe and
Speaker 1: joined us always buy Steve. There we go. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: ready to solve the mystery. Okay, I know, no intro
Speaker 1: straight into it. I like your way. Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this mystery, unfortunately, it's doesn't involve any bloodshed. There's no murders,
Speaker 1: no supernatural stuff. I know. I'm kind of on a
Speaker 1: no murder kick recently. H Yeah, so very true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is non violent. This is a very cerebral mystery.
Speaker 1: In early, very early in nineteen sixty four, about six
Speaker 1: weeks after the assassination of John F. Ken, a KGB
Speaker 1: agent who had been working for the CIA as an
Speaker 1: agent for US as a as a double agent. No, well,
Speaker 1: I guess if he's a KGB agent, he's sort of
Speaker 1: a double agent. But then a double Asian is really
Speaker 1: one who's a KGB agent is working for US, but
Speaker 1: he's still a KGB agent loyal to they have and
Speaker 1: passing disinformation to US. So he was working for US
Speaker 1: as an Asian agent, but he really actually was a
Speaker 1: double as although there's still controversy about that. That's one
Speaker 1: of the mysteries we're going going to address tonight. How
Speaker 1: much wood could it? Would? Chuck chuck chu chuck would
Speaker 1: is what that sounded like. Okay, okay, So obviously this
Speaker 1: is going to be a convoluted show and a little bit.
Speaker 1: But here's here's the if you're worried about a long, long,
Speaker 1: tedious show that grinds on forever. Now I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk really really fast and we're going to get it
Speaker 1: done with really fast. Okay, perfect, yeah, okay, all right, okay,
Speaker 1: so let's go back to the beginning. Who is this guy?
Speaker 1: His name was Urie A Sinko. Ury was part of
Speaker 1: a security attachment for a Soviet delegation to disarm It's
Speaker 1: a disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Okay, so he's Russians. Yep, Yep,
Speaker 1: he's a Russian. Okay, remember the kg B. When he
Speaker 1: was in Geneva, he passed a note secretly, of course,
Speaker 1: to a US diplomatic requesting a meeting with the US representative,
Speaker 1: which wasn't that you know, it means a spy. There's
Speaker 1: the man who was responsible for recruiting Soviet agents in
Speaker 1: Switzerland was a guy named Tenant Bagley who went by
Speaker 1: the name Pete. So Pete Bagley, Uh yeah, Tennant's got
Speaker 1: of cool. But apparently I don't know, he decided to
Speaker 1: go by Pete instead, don't I imagine that he probably
Speaker 1: got ridiculed a lot in school and I just said, oh,
Speaker 1: my name is Pete. Yeah, or it's just easier, or
Speaker 1: maybe well the guy is a spy. Maybe that was
Speaker 1: his like spy name, Yeah, Tenant, Pete. Yeah. They usually
Speaker 1: give him names like you know, Albatross or by the way,
Speaker 1: but in his case it was just Pete. Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 1: he was in charge of he and his team were
Speaker 1: in charge of going after a diplomats, intelligence officers, military attachs, whatever,
Speaker 1: and so he was notified. He flew to Geneva, he
Speaker 1: wasn't there at the time, and arranged for a note
Speaker 1: to be passed back to Nasenko which had a date,
Speaker 1: time and address on it, especially by day and time.
Speaker 1: He was waiting for Nasenko at a safe house and
Speaker 1: Nasenko eventually showed up a little bit like claimed he
Speaker 1: was trying to shake off a tail, so okay whatever,
Speaker 1: and said that he wanted to get some money from
Speaker 1: the CIA. Apparently he was part of the KGB delegation
Speaker 1: and he had sort of sort of like drank up.
Speaker 1: The story varies a little bit. One is that the
Speaker 1: money was stolen from him by a prostitute. Another one
Speaker 1: is he just drank and gambled it all the way.
Speaker 1: But essentially he was he had taken some official KGB
Speaker 1: funds and kind of lost it, and he needed funds.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to get caught. Yeah, his hand in
Speaker 1: the till. He needed to replace the fund so he
Speaker 1: offered to sell a manual to a KGB manual for
Speaker 1: nine hundreds was Friends, which detailed how to follow how
Speaker 1: the Soviets were able to follow US diplomats in Moscow
Speaker 1: and other Russian places. Well, and that that was correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong, Joe. But that was kind of
Speaker 1: a big problem for us when we were over there,
Speaker 1: is our guys kept getting popped left, right and center
Speaker 1: because the KGB operated differently and we kept falling for
Speaker 1: their tricks. Well, yeah, exactly, we were. We were evidently
Speaker 1: pretty easy to find. Uh yeah, and they they you mean,
Speaker 1: Americans in Russia were easy to find. That's that's the
Speaker 1: whole thing is it's so much easier for them to
Speaker 1: go about their business in our society because we're a free,
Speaker 1: open society whereas a closed totalitarian society, and so we
Speaker 1: stick out obviously like a sort thung. We're very easy
Speaker 1: to follow around and h And also on top of that,
Speaker 1: they've proved to be very they proved to be very
Speaker 1: very good at just spoofing us and and and like
Speaker 1: you know, sending false false agents our direction and just
Speaker 1: pumping us full of disinformation. And we've been every time
Speaker 1: on the line exactly, yeah, we have. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: you know, along came along came James Angleton, who was
Speaker 1: more of a skeptic in that regard. He was he
Speaker 1: was a lot more, a lot more skeptical about all
Speaker 1: these wonderful intelligence coups and everything. That made him less
Speaker 1: than popular with the intelligence gathering arm of the CIA,
Speaker 1: because you know, they just wanted to bring in lots
Speaker 1: of good intel and get promotions out of it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm getting way ahead of myself. So Pete Bagley asked
Speaker 1: Nasenko a standard list of questions. Number one, and of
Speaker 1: course it's a Soviet union about to attack the US. Answer, No,
Speaker 1: that's that's the one they're supposed to ask. First. Second
Speaker 1: one asked, he asked if he wants to defect, and
Speaker 1: the answer was no, because Nasenko said to their family
Speaker 1: and kids in Moscow, he just wanted to get that
Speaker 1: money so he could stay out of trouble. Bagley then
Speaker 1: asked him if he wanted to work for the CIA
Speaker 1: and make lots of money, and Nasenko said he'd think
Speaker 1: about it. So anyway, the meeting when I heard about
Speaker 1: two hours and then they parted ways. Two days later
Speaker 1: they got together again, and this time the CENCO had
Speaker 1: the KGB manual, which detailed how they followed our guys
Speaker 1: in Moscow, and he had thought about it and decided
Speaker 1: to be our agent. He returned to Moscow several days later.
Speaker 1: He'd been given a code name super cool and code
Speaker 1: name and like a secret password. And what was his
Speaker 1: code name? A E foxtrot? Oh yeah, great name. I okay,
Speaker 1: Well it's better than Pete got on one hand, on
Speaker 1: the other like a fox trot, like a E f E. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have no idea where they call it that. I've
Speaker 1: heard that said that all these these names they come
Speaker 1: up with for they just have a randomly generated list,
Speaker 1: and you just you know, when your name when you
Speaker 1: come up, then you grab the next one off the top.
Speaker 1: It's all random, so there's no connection to you that
Speaker 1: can be drawn, all right, I guess that's fair. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So anyway, he returned with some KGB documents and he
Speaker 1: agreed that just the spy and then eventually went back
Speaker 1: to Moscow. Pete Bagley went back to Washington to report
Speaker 1: on all this. He was quite excited about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: One of the things about Nosenko's he worked, according to him,
Speaker 1: at least he worked in the second chief director to
Speaker 1: the KGB. This is a part of the KGB the
Speaker 1: CIA had not even been aware of until a few
Speaker 1: years before, and they knew nothing about it, and so
Speaker 1: they were quite excited at it to have an agent
Speaker 1: right in the heart of this whole thing. So Bagley
Speaker 1: and his boss were very, very excited about the whole thing. Anyway,
Speaker 1: let me take a quite quick side trip here. So
Speaker 1: the CIA Soviet Russia division of which Pete Bagley was
Speaker 1: a part, was the most important branch of their intelligence
Speaker 1: collection department. So they've got various departments. The main most
Speaker 1: important part of part of course, it's the part that
Speaker 1: goes out and gets intelligence. And then they had like
Speaker 1: the counterintelligence side, et cetera, et cetera. But of the
Speaker 1: intelligence gathering part, the Soviet Russia division at that time
Speaker 1: was the most important division the CIA. Sure it had
Speaker 1: its own counterintelligence branch also, and eventually Pete Bagley wanted
Speaker 1: up being ahead of the counterintelligence branch with that. And
Speaker 1: there's another counterintelligence branch which is CIA Counterintelligence, which was
Speaker 1: headed by James Jesus Angleton, who I'm sure you guys
Speaker 1: have all heard of christ Hits, Yeah exactly, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: So what they focus on is preventing penetration of the
Speaker 1: organization by foreign intelligence services. And also another one of
Speaker 1: their jobs is to sort out information from disinformation. And
Speaker 1: this leads to and so in other words, because foreign
Speaker 1: intelligence services are constantly going to be trying to feed
Speaker 1: you lies and manipulate your perception of what they're up to,
Speaker 1: then you have to find a way to sort out
Speaker 1: the validity of these people that come present themselves and
Speaker 1: want to be your agent. So anyway, badly, as I
Speaker 1: was saying, was back in Washington, he got a message
Speaker 1: from Angleton requesting to have a meeting with him. I've
Speaker 1: already told you who he is. James Jesus Angleton was
Speaker 1: the head of CIA counter Intelligence. So Angleton in his office,
Speaker 1: Angleton hands him a file about a Soviet defector, and
Speaker 1: the account that I read of this, it didn't say
Speaker 1: who the defector was, but I presume it's Anatotly Delitsen,
Speaker 1: who was an actual autentic Soviet defector who defected a
Speaker 1: few years before Nosenko. The high points of Nosenka's story
Speaker 1: were basically identical to the other file stories. So in
Speaker 1: other words, it was it became kind of obvious that
Speaker 1: Nosenka was probably just a dangle. He was just somebody
Speaker 1: that had been dangled in front of our guys and
Speaker 1: we took the bait and so and so he was probably,
Speaker 1: in Angleton's opinion, he was almost certainly a double Asian
Speaker 1: and not for real. So he was just going to
Speaker 1: pass us dense information. So he's basically just regurgitating a
Speaker 1: story that they'd used on us, or somebody had told
Speaker 1: us before. Then. Yeah, because you know, it's like it's like,
Speaker 1: as one guy put it, it's like fly fishing, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, you try a lure and you send it
Speaker 1: out there. If it doesn't work, you change lures and
Speaker 1: you just keep going like that until the fish bites.
Speaker 1: And you know you've got a good lure, so let's
Speaker 1: start using that lure a lot. And that's what they do.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, one of the one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things is like one of the things that the KGB
Speaker 1: knows that we like to see is an agentist got
Speaker 1: a little bit of a problem with either you know,
Speaker 1: Booze or women or something like that, some weakness. It's
Speaker 1: going to make him spend too much money or whatever.
Speaker 1: And then of course he's going to need to turn
Speaker 1: to us for money in terms for secrets and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And so that was definitely a part of
Speaker 1: Nasenko's story, Booze, the women, the whole thing. Pete Bagley
Speaker 1: was very disappointed because he was very excited about landing
Speaker 1: this big fish. Angleton, on the other hand, felt like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we can he's still useful. We could pass
Speaker 1: we could pass a little misinformation back through him to
Speaker 1: the KGB. So it's not all it's not all bad.
Speaker 1: That's where the story leaves out. For the time being,
Speaker 1: they kept him on a payroll, but they labeled his
Speaker 1: information as untrustworthy. Of course, of course they didn't go
Speaker 1: tell him that. They made him believe that they still
Speaker 1: believed his story. But anyway, he was back in Russia.
Speaker 1: Time goes by, and as I said earlier, about six
Speaker 1: weeks century JFK is assassinated. He send he sends a
Speaker 1: message wanted, requesting a meeting again in Geneva, and when
Speaker 1: he meets with Bagley this time, he wants to defect. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how how long is that after like our first encounter,
Speaker 1: about a year and a half, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Oh yeah, you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: I said what the day it was the day it
Speaker 1: was like June nineteen sixty two when he first made
Speaker 1: contact with us. Oh okay, So I'm glad you clarified that.
Speaker 1: For some reason, to me, it was a much shorter
Speaker 1: time span. And I think it's just because everything starts
Speaker 1: up about where you're you're at right now, and yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the details I think I go over. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so now he'd been in our employee feeding sbs for
Speaker 1: about you know, a year and a half, and we've
Speaker 1: been feeding mbs. Oh yeah, of course, yeah, And that's
Speaker 1: there's great ways you can do that. You know, if
Speaker 1: you know this guy's at double you can do you
Speaker 1: can do things like request information about this, about that,
Speaker 1: and say you're like super interested exactly so to give
Speaker 1: them an idea of of you know, of what we're
Speaker 1: wondering about your military grade beatles. Uhh exactly. Yeah, we'd
Speaker 1: like to know about ice fishing off your eastern coast. Uh,
Speaker 1: you just ran how many information about that? Oh? You
Speaker 1: do so one of the yeah, and the spy. In
Speaker 1: the spy business, every little, every teeny little tidbit gets
Speaker 1: gets considered, so you know, and so any little piece
Speaker 1: of BS that you can feed him is valuable. So
Speaker 1: he says he wants to defect, and so he cabled
Speaker 1: back to vaguely cable back to CIA headquarters and and
Speaker 1: even though this guy was obviously a double Asian, they
Speaker 1: had and they sad, he said, leting him defect. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: oh you know, I left out the most important part.
Speaker 1: Let me get let me go back here for a sec.
Speaker 1: He said he wanted to defect, and he said that
Speaker 1: the reason he wanted to defect is that he was
Speaker 1: that he had come into suspicion and even more importantly,
Speaker 1: he said that he knew something about Lee Harvey Oswald, Right,
Speaker 1: that's right, Okay, the assassination connections, that's right. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so the department that he worked for, uh, in the
Speaker 1: in that department, subdepartment within that is what's called the
Speaker 1: Tourist Bureau. And what they're and their job is there,
Speaker 1: it's a counterintelligence thing. And underneath that counterintelligence division, they
Speaker 1: there are agents in their own departments who just follow
Speaker 1: around journalists and the Western diplomats and tourists who are
Speaker 1: in actually in the Soviet Union, trying to recruit them
Speaker 1: and been also basically spying on them. So since Oswald
Speaker 1: wasn't an American in Russia, he would have fallen into
Speaker 1: the purview of this guy's buried department. And and so
Speaker 1: that made it must have made him stand out even more,
Speaker 1: is you know, curiosity to them. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 1: somebody a potentially valuable recruit, perhaps, you know, assassin who
Speaker 1: knows the Senko says that he was actually assigned to
Speaker 1: watch Oswald wile Oswald was there. And then after the assassination,
Speaker 1: Oswald of course by the time obviously had left the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. Yeah, yeah, quite obviously a couple months. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so after the assassination, he was apparently assigned to
Speaker 1: go through all of his KGB files and interview interview
Speaker 1: everybody and you know, just find out precisely, you know,
Speaker 1: who talked to him and what then, and who had
Speaker 1: made contact with him, and if if there really was
Speaker 1: any sort of KGB control over this guy over Oswald. Sure,
Speaker 1: and of course he reported absolutely not well, and that
Speaker 1: would that would be really important for them to know
Speaker 1: because if they are some way responsible for the assassination
Speaker 1: of an American president at a time where we were
Speaker 1: always ready with the thumb on the big red button, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's another world going on. That's not something you want
Speaker 1: to have happened or have anybody find out about. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Even though he was untrusted, he didn't really have a
Speaker 1: lot of value to us as a defector. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this one clear up to the CA director Richard Hilmes,
Speaker 1: he was a director at the time, he authorized the
Speaker 1: affection because otherwise they could have been accused of suppressing
Speaker 1: information relevant to the assassinationw So, so they smuggled him,
Speaker 1: smuggled them out of Switzerland on a military plane, got
Speaker 1: them back to the States, and at this point they
Speaker 1: were wondering exactly what to do with them, so they
Speaker 1: did the obvious thing. They had locked him up, Yeah,
Speaker 1: having a dungeons. Yeah yeah. They built a little special
Speaker 1: cell forum in the basement of a house in Washington
Speaker 1: suburbs and basically locked him up and interrogated him for
Speaker 1: about three and a half years. Wow. Yeah, Yeah, they
Speaker 1: went after him quite a bit. It's a long interrogation. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: especially for somebody who came to you and said, hey,
Speaker 1: we I want to defect to America because I have
Speaker 1: this information. Well there's some issues though, and I don't
Speaker 1: know if you were going to get to this, Joe,
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I know really prompted
Speaker 1: them to go ahead and lock him up initially was
Speaker 1: the fact that his reason for wanting to defect was
Speaker 1: he had gotten correct me if I'm wrong here, is
Speaker 1: that he had gotten a cable saying come back to Moscow,
Speaker 1: at which point he was worried they'd figured out he
Speaker 1: was playing the game and he was going to be killed.
Speaker 1: But when we had everybody look into it, there was
Speaker 1: no record of the request this cable. Yeah, it took
Speaker 1: it took a little while to sort that out. I think,
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, I guess it's just the three years
Speaker 1: is like a really long time. Yeah, it's a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's definitely above and beyond. Yeah, it sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, and and I don't think we're ever going
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom quite exactly why he was
Speaker 1: locked up and interrogated for quite that long of a time.
Speaker 1: They did catch him out in a couple of them,
Speaker 1: a couple of significant lives, actually more than a couple.
Speaker 1: One was one was about the cable, the telegram recalling him,
Speaker 1: and another significant aside about that is that the FBI
Speaker 1: had a major source called Fedora, and he was a
Speaker 1: he was a Soviet diplomat in New York and that
Speaker 1: was his code named Fedora. That's not his Russian name.
Speaker 1: But so they'd been this this guy, Fedora was a
Speaker 1: double agent also and they didn't know it, of course,
Speaker 1: and he'd been feeding them disinformation for years. Yeah, so Fedora.
Speaker 1: So Fedora comes along and they're they're asking him if
Speaker 1: he knows anything about Nosenko, and he's saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the the chief of the KGB KGB office in New
Speaker 1: York had called a meeting in a bunch of kg
Speaker 1: KGB agents and also Fedora, who was a diplomat but
Speaker 1: still a high level Russian so he was in on
Speaker 1: this and and spelled out a few details, a lot
Speaker 1: of relevant details actually, like his rank and the KGB
Speaker 1: lieutenant colonel, which it later turned out he'd been lying about.
Speaker 1: Nasenko admitted that under interrogation, and also he confirmed that yes,
Speaker 1: there had indeed been a telegram recalling him. He'd heard
Speaker 1: about that also, you know, and of course this was
Speaker 1: like later like sort of you know, backfart of Fedora
Speaker 1: a little bit, because it sort of, you know, after
Speaker 1: Nosenko confessed that he'd been lying about this stuff, suddenly
Speaker 1: people are looking at Fedora and thinking, gee, gosh, why
Speaker 1: exactly are you telling us this stuff which corroborates his
Speaker 1: story when we know specifically that this stuff was a
Speaker 1: lot because he admitted it. And that's and and the
Speaker 1: fact that Fedora eventually was proven to be a double
Speaker 1: agent who was trying to back up his story sort
Speaker 1: of as another nail and uring Cenko's coffin. Yeah, Fodor
Speaker 1: was obviously a spy, so that that makes that makes
Speaker 1: the CENCO a double as two, I know, all right.
Speaker 1: So anyway, so they interrogated in for three and a
Speaker 1: half years. And by the way, this was not done,
Speaker 1: h not done just like unauthorized or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Richard Helms, again director of the CIA, went to the
Speaker 1: Department of Justice, which was headed by Robert F. Kennedy,
Speaker 1: JFK's brother, and got permission to lock this guy up
Speaker 1: and detain him for as long as need be to
Speaker 1: try to ring any information out of him. They were
Speaker 1: accused later on of withholding information from the FBI and
Speaker 1: from the Warren Commission, which was investigating the JFK assassination,
Speaker 1: but Helms had actually met with Chief Justice Earl Warren
Speaker 1: explained to him the reason why because Warren had heard
Speaker 1: about the CENCO and was thinking about how calling him
Speaker 1: to testify and explain to him why he would not
Speaker 1: be a reliable witness. And so but nonetheless, I mean
Speaker 1: still to this day there's there's people who accuse the
Speaker 1: CIA of imprisoning him specifically to keep him from the FBI,
Speaker 1: the Commission. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, because you know,
Speaker 1: people love a good conspiracy theory, especially concerning GfK. Yeah.
Speaker 1: JFK is one of the longest running I feel conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah, oh yeah, I didn't get into that.
Speaker 1: His assassinate that's another mystery we need to solve, by
Speaker 1: the way, real quickly. GfK assassination. He was assassinated by
Speaker 1: Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald was a hardcore communist
Speaker 1: and the devote of Fidel Castro, and you know, probably
Speaker 1: not quite too straight in the head. But what about
Speaker 1: the woman in the babushka, what about the four shooters? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is one area where the second may have been
Speaker 1: telling the truth. And he was asked about about whether
Speaker 1: the kgb A contacted Oswald tried to recruit him, and
Speaker 1: what he said was that he had been had been watched, obviously,
Speaker 1: and it had been decided that he was not quite
Speaker 1: smart enough and too unstable to really be good effective
Speaker 1: as so sure, and that's fair. That's yeah, that sounds
Speaker 1: plausible to me. Probably accurate. Yeah, it's it's pretty probably
Speaker 1: accurate assessment. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, okay, and
Speaker 1: now we sell the JFK assassination. Let's get back to
Speaker 1: this thing. Let me go to the next one. I know,
Speaker 1: I know who else was assassinated and Nko. Eventually, as
Speaker 1: I said, confessed had lied about certain things, but he
Speaker 1: never completely recanned his entire story. Eventually he was released.
Speaker 1: He was given a large sum of money and a
Speaker 1: new identity and relocated. And the most mysterious or one
Speaker 1: of the mysterious, most mysterious parts of this whole thing
Speaker 1: is he was quote unquote rehabilitated by the CIA, which
Speaker 1: is like and I've got and I've heard some declassified
Speaker 1: documents like I've got I've got some memos from Angleton
Speaker 1: to the FBI, for example, detailing and great detail, all
Speaker 1: the many many reasons why no sinko and it should
Speaker 1: not be believed when you look at it. It's pretty dumb,
Speaker 1: stated is to Nasenko's case. And actually, if if our
Speaker 1: listeners are lucky, I'll post a couple of those on
Speaker 1: our websites. Yeah, they'red of it's kind of funny there.
Speaker 1: They're kind of old and smudgie. They were just recently
Speaker 1: the classified, old and smudgie with a lot of markings
Speaker 1: all over them and stuff. But there some of them
Speaker 1: are pretty interesting and eye opening. But anyway, I guess
Speaker 1: you know, if you have somebody in the basement locked
Speaker 1: up for three and a half years, and you're like
Speaker 1: torturing them for information for three and a half years.
Speaker 1: When you release them, it behooves you to say, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they're rehabilitated and they're never going to talk about this ever,
Speaker 1: then saying like no, this person is still like maybe dangerous,
Speaker 1: but we're just gonna like release them anyways. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think if you torture somebody enough, they're going to
Speaker 1: get rehabilitated to what you want. I am maybe. Well,
Speaker 1: then the other thing is, you know, at what point
Speaker 1: do you realize that, Wow, we've had this guy here
Speaker 1: for a long time and he hasn't changed the story anymore.
Speaker 1: Should we stop or Stockholm syndrome? Well do we just
Speaker 1: keep going? Yeah, a certain point, you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, this guy quite likely is still lying to
Speaker 1: you about some major things. Maybe, but obviously he's not
Speaker 1: going to break so you know after three and a
Speaker 1: half years, so it's just time to cut to the chase.
Speaker 1: Or he does, right and he says, no, I was lying.
Speaker 1: I was lying about everything. Can you release me now?
Speaker 1: Because it's been three and a half years and in
Speaker 1: dungeon in a basement. Yeah, I'm kind of tired of this,
Speaker 1: tired of it. Yeah, No, you're totally right. You're totally right.
Speaker 1: You're totally right about everything. You know that. I would
Speaker 1: say that if I were in the basement for three
Speaker 1: and a half years. Yeah, absolutely, I would agree with whatever.
Speaker 1: If you said, yeah, you are you know, you're a
Speaker 1: North Korean spy, I would say, yep, yeah, is that
Speaker 1: going to make you release me? Okay? Yeah, I got
Speaker 1: to tell you. If I'm a spy and they and
Speaker 1: they put me in the torture chamber, I'm going to
Speaker 1: just say, hey, dude, no need, I'll tell you whatever
Speaker 1: you want to know. I'm a spy. Why none of
Speaker 1: us would make good spies? Yeah, exam yeah, yeah. Well
Speaker 1: but anyway, this is where the whole thing gets turned
Speaker 1: upside down because everybody, I mean Angleton and the head
Speaker 1: of the and Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and
Speaker 1: look at the head of the Soviet Russian Division, and
Speaker 1: also his underlying Pete Bagley. Every all of them were
Speaker 1: totally convinced that Nosenka was a double agent, and they
Speaker 1: had good reason to believe so, and h and yet
Speaker 1: when I say that Nosenka was rehabilitated, what that means
Speaker 1: is basically, the CIA changed their minds and decided, you know,
Speaker 1: he's for real after all, and he's a good guy,
Speaker 1: and so they, like I said, they let him go.
Speaker 1: And they actually he wound up eventually getting getting well
Speaker 1: paid to be a counter intelligence consultant to the CIA. Meantime, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the chief, the head of the Soviet Russian Division was
Speaker 1: transferred off to some other backwater somewhere. Pete Bagley was
Speaker 1: also passed over for promotion, transferred up to a backwater somewhere.
Speaker 1: Angleton was cashiered, even though he had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the imprisonment with the guys that had actually had
Speaker 1: some to do with the imprisonment. Well, maybe that's kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting mystery, is how exactly is it that
Speaker 1: despite all the massive evidence of the contrary, they just
Speaker 1: decided that he was there for it was their boy,
Speaker 1: and they actually hired him to be a consultant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a mystery. Again, I think that I don't
Speaker 1: mean to interrupt your Joe, but again I think that
Speaker 1: somebody finally realized, you've had this guy for three and
Speaker 1: a half years, You've got nothing out of him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's time to cut him loose and we're not going
Speaker 1: to have egg on our face. We've got to do
Speaker 1: something to pretend or attempt to put a band aid
Speaker 1: on this and make it look okay. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: and that could be it. I mean, that's that's you know,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of ways of looking at the purge.
Speaker 1: That's the Soviet Russian Division purge. One is that the
Speaker 1: mole triumph to manage to like, you know, kill everybody
Speaker 1: that stood stood in his path, and that was a
Speaker 1: threat to him, and God, all the people who are
Speaker 1: threatening him removed. That's one way of looking at it,
Speaker 1: or another way of looking at it is like you say,
Speaker 1: when this came out, it was it was kind of controversial.
Speaker 1: This is the only person who'd ever been in prisoned
Speaker 1: by the CIA, much less for three and a half years,
Speaker 1: so they might have decided it was, you know, was
Speaker 1: maybe the best thing to do was to sort of
Speaker 1: cashier the people are responsible for this whole thing and
Speaker 1: just pretend like, yeah, it's all in the up and up.
Speaker 1: They did wrong. We love you, we love you Ury.
Speaker 1: So maybe that is, as you say, maybe that is
Speaker 1: what they were doing. Well, we will hang on a
Speaker 1: second here. I don't suddenly saying the mole. So was
Speaker 1: Uri saying the whole time that there was a mole
Speaker 1: in the CIA? Or no? Or is this just some
Speaker 1: people have said there was a mole in the mole?
Speaker 1: Or is the mall no? Now, you're obviously wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been a very good mole since nobody ever believed him. Yeah, yeah, Angleton,
Speaker 1: Angleton firmly believed in the male that there was a
Speaker 1: mole and there and there's other evidence to that. I'd
Speaker 1: actually I get to that in a second. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's quite possible if there was a mole. But like
Speaker 1: I said, the other possibility is just that the CIA
Speaker 1: decided to do play politics and just cashier these people
Speaker 1: to sort of forestall scandal. Yeah, I guess. You know,
Speaker 1: if you've got somebody for three and a half years, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and their story isn't changing and it turns out that
Speaker 1: perhaps they've been innocent this whole time, how do you
Speaker 1: deal with that? Yeah? You know, how do you save face? You?
Speaker 1: You know, say, all these people are getting older, they're
Speaker 1: going to go take over these backwater places. That's going
Speaker 1: to take some early retirement. And this person that we've
Speaker 1: been holding for three and a half years, is getting
Speaker 1: a very large cast cash settlement and gets to go
Speaker 1: live a totally normal life. That's what's happening. That's how
Speaker 1: we're going to make this go away. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think that. I don't think that anybody. It's hard for
Speaker 1: me to believe that anybody ever thought that he was
Speaker 1: innocent of all charges or that he was totally on
Speaker 1: the up and up and not a double agent. Sure,
Speaker 1: but worthy of being held for three and a half years.
Speaker 1: At a certain point he had to be like go
Speaker 1: obviously he had to be. I mean, but the major
Speaker 1: players involved, including Angleton and Pete Bagley, always believed, you know,
Speaker 1: after that, that he was he was a double agent,
Speaker 1: and certainly there was good reason for that was that,
Speaker 1: I guess you know. My question then is like was
Speaker 1: that normal treatment of double agents? Like if they capture
Speaker 1: double agent agent, did they just throw them in normal jail?
Speaker 1: Did they like what did they do with that? You know? Well,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, if you have a double agent, they're usually
Speaker 1: living overseas. So somebody that's pretending to, like, say, work
Speaker 1: for the KGB, he's working with the KGB, but pretending
Speaker 1: to work for you while he's actually working for them. Still. Sure,
Speaker 1: so you're not going to capture and throw them or
Speaker 1: jail or anything like that. You're just usually just gonna
Speaker 1: be mysterious. Depth is how do you take care of that?
Speaker 1: I would I would presume. No, you don't even do that.
Speaker 1: You you know, you just feed them misinformation again by
Speaker 1: by you let them feed you disinformation, thinking that they're
Speaker 1: succeeding and misleading you even though they're not. Come on,
Speaker 1: come on, I'm going. I'm going with the bored identity thing.
Speaker 1: That's when you kill them. That's more fun. I know,
Speaker 1: I like that better too. I'm sure it happens every
Speaker 1: now and again, but it's actually more profitable to do
Speaker 1: stuff like like feed them misinformation, like I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: by just the questions that you asked them. You can
Speaker 1: just lead them, sure, but anyway, so last of all,
Speaker 1: I don't want to stretch this on forever. We can
Speaker 1: go back and forth, and we're in this whole wilderness
Speaker 1: of mirrors thing, and who the hell knows, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to know. But yeah, but as far
Speaker 1: as the existence of the mole goes, I mean, we've
Speaker 1: had moles in the CIA before there was there was
Speaker 1: Kim Philby back in the late forties. He was he
Speaker 1: was a British liaison to the CIA. He turned out
Speaker 1: to be a Soviet agent and of course more recently
Speaker 1: too late to be the mole in this case. But
Speaker 1: Aldra James started working in the late sixties for the CIA.
Speaker 1: That was Did you've heard of Alder James? Right? I
Speaker 1: like that. Joe keep saying these names like you and
Speaker 1: I actually think did they make they made a movie
Speaker 1: about this guy about five or ten years ago? Didn't
Speaker 1: his names there? Philby? Uh No, the second guy, the
Speaker 1: one Alder James. Yeah, because he was doing he was
Speaker 1: a mole and doing this for thirty years or something,
Speaker 1: some horrendous amount of time. I don't know if he
Speaker 1: thirty years, but it was a long time. And what
Speaker 1: was most amazing about it was how brazen the guy was.
Speaker 1: I'd say, for argument's sake that I have no idea
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. I mean, of course I know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Just for our listeners, precisely, precisely
Speaker 1: what are you talking I'll do this really briefly, because
Speaker 1: he's obviously not the mole in question here. He's never
Speaker 1: uncovered that we know of, but you never know. Sometimes
Speaker 1: moles are uncovered and they're just quietly, quietly sent out
Speaker 1: the pasture, you know, because they don't want to scandal James.
Speaker 1: So let's go to Audre James. He joined the CIA,
Speaker 1: I believe in nineteen sixty nine, and he was working
Speaker 1: as an analyst. And it's been a while, so I've
Speaker 1: actually forgotten a lot of the details, but some of
Speaker 1: the most I remember some of the most hilarious details,
Speaker 1: which is that for he worked in the office at
Speaker 1: Langley and he would actually just walk out of the
Speaker 1: building some days with grocery bags full of secret documents
Speaker 1: into the Russians. So the guy drove the guy was,
Speaker 1: you know, a civil servant, but he drove a Jaguar
Speaker 1: and he had a six hundred thousand dollars house that
Speaker 1: he paid for with cash. And he's like, they didn't
Speaker 1: catch him, and they didn't catch him for years, and
Speaker 1: so I mean, how competent these guys are? Serious he
Speaker 1: did it was ten twenty years something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I have a long time. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I have not spent a while, and I have not
Speaker 1: brushed up in my recollection. The whole thing. But the
Speaker 1: whole thing was the scandalous thing about it was not
Speaker 1: just the secrets, but how easy it was and how
Speaker 1: crazy the guy was, and then the general incompetence of
Speaker 1: the people that were supposed to keep an eye for
Speaker 1: stuff like this. Okay, yeah, so this maybe more off.
Speaker 1: Kim Phillby real quick like Kim Phillbby was a rising
Speaker 1: star in six the Brittish Secret Service. He was son
Speaker 1: of Sir Harold Phillby, who was the lawrence of Arabia
Speaker 1: of the Saywudi clan. Yeah, I know he've heard of
Speaker 1: all even you know all that stuff, right, So he
Speaker 1: was a son of Harold Phillyby. He was a rising star.
Speaker 1: It was almost a certainty that he would be the
Speaker 1: next director of m I six and for a time
Speaker 1: he was sent out to be liaison with the CIA,
Speaker 1: which had been recently formed. The CIA did not start
Speaker 1: until nineteen forty seven, and so he spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time over here from forty seven to nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: helping us get started and serving as a liaison between
Speaker 1: the two services, giving us advice and spending a lot
Speaker 1: of time talking with us, especially with Angleton. I think
Speaker 1: this is probably a formative searing experience for Angleton. Spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking with James Angleton about what
Speaker 1: was going on, and of course afterwards Angleton realized he'd
Speaker 1: been had. Maybe that was what made him so suspicious
Speaker 1: about this kind of second future. So anyway, he wasn't old.
Speaker 1: But anyway between that time, of course there exists the
Speaker 1: possibility of other moles too. And the thing about about
Speaker 1: a mole is that if you're trying to penetrate a
Speaker 1: service or deceive a service, like to seea what you
Speaker 1: need to have, what's really kind of essential, is to
Speaker 1: have feedback. You need to know that you're actually your
Speaker 1: story is believed and that your ruse is working. And
Speaker 1: so otherwise you just keep trying the same old thing
Speaker 1: over and over again and it's not working and you
Speaker 1: don't even realize it's not working or why it's not working.
Speaker 1: So that doesn't so the fact that you know that
Speaker 1: doesn't prove anything necessarily. But but what's interesting about the
Speaker 1: no Cenco case is that as far as the Soviets
Speaker 1: knew he was a valid disinformation agent, we had recruited him,
Speaker 1: he was feeding SBS that that in a sense, in
Speaker 1: a sense that essentially made him a valuable person. And
Speaker 1: yet suddenly they decide we're gonna make We're going to
Speaker 1: have the guide defect over to our side to argue
Speaker 1: the case for why Oswald had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: the kg B. So that would argue for the existence
Speaker 1: of the mole, because the mole had the mole was
Speaker 1: aware that we didn't trust the CENCO anyway and that
Speaker 1: we were unsure that he was really not a double agent.
Speaker 1: So I guess at that point that that mole would
Speaker 1: have been like pretty high up, it would have been.
Speaker 1: He would have been yeah, yeah, pretty high up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not just like a run of the mill agent. No, no, no, obviously,
Speaker 1: because there's compartmentalization. Although then again, considering some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that's like with the Ames case, who they put
Speaker 1: this stuff on this in the company newsletter comes all
Speaker 1: around line this year be sure if you run into Nansenko.
Speaker 1: So if it was assuming that goes purpose, assuming he
Speaker 1: was sent and the purpose of his being sent was
Speaker 1: to reassure us that he had had no that Oswald
Speaker 1: had no part in the assassination, no connection to them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: then then it would makes sense because he would be
Speaker 1: upond that would be easily sacrificed because they knew, through
Speaker 1: the existence of their feedback device, the mole, they knew
Speaker 1: he was of no value to them anyway. Sure, so yeah,
Speaker 1: otherwise they're sacrificing a valuable asset for no particular reason.
Speaker 1: All right, So that's one argument for the existence of
Speaker 1: the mold. Supposing supposing also that they wanted to send
Speaker 1: him to discredit embarrass the CIA. Supposing they know through
Speaker 1: their asset on on our side, they know that he
Speaker 1: is not not particularly believed or trusted. So they know
Speaker 1: that when he shows up with his story about Oswald
Speaker 1: and how he knew Oswald and this, did this back,
Speaker 1: that did all this investigation of Oswald, and then the
Speaker 1: CIA of course thinks it's BS and so they don't
Speaker 1: and so they don't take him to the Warren Commission
Speaker 1: or the FBI or anybody else to testify. Later on,
Speaker 1: he calls a press conference and says, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: I showed up to the CIA headquarters and with all
Speaker 1: this information about Oswald, and you know, they just tried
Speaker 1: to shut me up. They didn't let me testify before
Speaker 1: the Warren Commission, and that can then that could be
Speaker 1: just one more way of sowing confusion and suspicion and
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories, which is yet another So again, and this
Speaker 1: is all pure speculation on my part, sure, but they
Speaker 1: would both sort of semi support the existence. Certainly is
Speaker 1: the possibility the existence of a mole in the ranks
Speaker 1: of the CIA. So I guess the big mystery here
Speaker 1: is was there a mole? And if there was, who
Speaker 1: was it? All Right, here's the here's the part where
Speaker 1: we flip a coin. Okay, anybody got a quarter? No? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, heads, heads, it's okay. There was a molemal yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's how that's how we're kind of this.
Speaker 1: We are kind of in the wilderness and mirrors here.
Speaker 1: So sometimes tails meets heads, yeah, yeah, you never know,
Speaker 1: sometimes it lands on its side. Yeah, that happens a
Speaker 1: lot does Yeah. So anyway, and in researching this thing,
Speaker 1: I've come across some interesting declassified documents, like some memos
Speaker 1: from Angleton to the FBI. So some of them I
Speaker 1: still I'm still actually rooting to a lot of There's
Speaker 1: there's quite a few of them out there. I obviously
Speaker 1: we're not going to put them all out there in
Speaker 1: the website. Stuff. I thought it might be interesting to
Speaker 1: put one or two out there, so we'll have links
Speaker 1: to those things for you guys to look at. Where
Speaker 1: are we going to have links for that. We're going
Speaker 1: to have those like on our website, I think, which
Speaker 1: is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com if you want to,
Speaker 1: If you want to send us an email, send us
Speaker 1: an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us an iTunes, find us on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Oh and yes, of course you can find us on Stitcher. Anyway.
Speaker 1: That's it for now, so long everybody, Thanks a lot, guys, Bye,
Speaker 1: feel so unfinished