NEWS ARTICLE: AGENTS, ASSASSINS, AND MOLES

• Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION
• Collection: Records Related to the Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 00364618
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: June 6, 2025
• Document Release Date: June 12, 2025
• Publication Date: April 23, 1978

104-10404-10374 JcLE ApZEAA'En: ON PAGE �/ gents, SSCISSins, oles WASHINGTON 23 APRIL 1 LEGEND: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Os- paid. By Edward Jay Epstein. %Reader's Di- .zest/McGraw Hill. 382 pp. $12.95 � � By GEORGE LARDNER URI IVANOVICH NOSENKO had endured far more arduous interrogations. This one lasted only four hours and it was not held in the padded basement-room � where the Central Intelligence Agency had once confined bun for three long years. Now drawing a $30,000-a-year al- lowance from that same CIA, Nosenko presented himself on a March afternoon in 1976 at the Washington offices oZ � Reader's Digest. His interviewer, Edward Jay Epstein, con- cluded the questioning that evening with a flourish: dinner :at an elegant French restaurant a couple of blocks away. That the interview took place at all was remai }cable. Nosenko is a former KGB officer who defected to the United States just 10 weeks after the sesassination of Presi- dent-John F. Kennedy. According to the CIA, exactly what be had to say is still so sensitive, so special, so secret that its � disclosure even now could "only interfere with, American ' counterintelligence efforts." Yet according to Epstein, who ; tape-recorded Nosenko's remarks for this book, "the CIA �put me onto him." e No doubt the CIA thought It would get a good press. "I !.presume that it found out I was writing a book on Lee Har- vey Oswald and it wanted me to put Nosenko's message in , It," Epstein told New York magazine recently. "Nosenko's 'message was that Oswald was a complete loner in the ; Soviet Union and never had any connection or debriefing ;..by the KGB." . Epstein then began tsliring to the Agency's formidable ex-chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. He : had a darker view of Nosenko's presence in this country. What Epstein has written, hundreds of interviews later, 'els a fascinating, important and essentially dishonest book. ' Fascinating because it offers new information about Os- wald, about the KGB, and about the CIA. Dishonest because :'it pretends to he objective, because it is saddled with :demonstrable errors and inexcusable omissions, because it assumes that the KGB always kaows 'what it is doing while'l -the CIA does not. It is paranoicL It Is nalVe. � Nosenko's defection was Officially proclaimed by .the (-State Department on Feb., 9, 1954, whereupon he quickly disappeared from public *notice. He told the FBI that he had personally supervised the-KGB's file on Lee Harvey Os- ' 'weld and thus could assure the; Amerieaes that Oswald had :no connection with the KGB.. : . � - Epstein concludes; as Angleton obviously bad, that "Nosenko was a Soviet intelligence agent dispatched by the .1 KGB expressly for the purpose of delivering dieinforraa- lion to the CIA, FBI zed 'Warren Coratnissioa." In short, Lee nary. Cy Othvald, the- supposedione assassin: of President Kennedy, may well have been working for the KGB at one point or another in his shabby life. Nosenko ' said this wasn't true. And therefore, according to Legend's logic, it was. Oswald, the ex-Marine who had defected to Russia in 1959 and returned three years later, had been liv- ing a legend," a false biography concocted for him by the KGB. � That is far from the most startling assertion that Epstein has to make. Legend is really two books, stretched thin. His central message, although cushioned with all the Careful ambiguities of a State Department communique, is that the. assumes that the KGB always knows what it is doing while. the CIA does not. It is paranoid; It is naive. - � Nosenko's defection was officially proclaimed by the State Department on Feb. 9, 1964, whereupon he quickly � disappeared from public notice. He told the FBI that he had personally supervised the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Os: we'd and thus could assure the Ameriraes that Oswald had no connection with the KGB. Epstein concludes, as Angleton obviously had, that "Nosenko was a Soviet intelligence agent dispatched by the KGB expressly for the purpose of delivering slisinforma- lion to the CIA, FBI and Warren Commission." - - !highest echelons of the American Intelligence community have been infiltrated by the KGB, penetrated by an enemy 'mole" who made his way to some key position at the CIA . Cr� some other agency. - . It is all quite plausible. The British and West German in- telligence services had been successfully compromised by the Soviets since World War II. Kira Philby, who was recruited at his university, rose to become the head of the counterintelligence division of Britain's MI-5 before he was exposed. In West Germany, Epstein notes, the Soviets suc- ceeded in getting their own man, Heinz Feller, installed as head of counterintelligence by sacrificing other agents "like pawns in a chess game." So why not here? The meta- physics of espionage, where nothing is what it seems, can be seductive. Judging from Epstein's book, the best proof ...of the existence of an American "mole" lies in the fact that . he hasn't been found yet Another piece of evidence: Nosenko told the CIA there was no "Mr. Big." Step up the search! . � .� �� � . Surprisingly, Legend is weakest where it should be strongest, demonstrably slipshod where it should be solid. � Epstein's first book, Inquest The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, was one of the first to expose . the shortcomings of that inquiry. Yet here he deals with the Kennedy assassination in a cavalier appendix entitled ' "The Status of the Evidence" that makes one wonder whether Epstein has even glanced at the Warren Report in the last 10 years. He seems not to have even looked at the � 'pictures. � . . � Take, for example, Epstein's confident assertion that the Warren Commission "made a serious error in reckonine the elapsed time" from the first rifle shot to the last. The- Commission, he declares, staged a reconstruction of the as- sassination in mid-1964 when the oak tree blocking the line of sight from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book De-. � pository "was in full bloom. But the assassination occurred on November 22nd when the deciduous tree had no foli- age." Therefore, the assassin had more time to fire than the � Commission gave him. C_OAXINTIE:D CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM , RELEASE IN FULL k sounds like a nifty piece of detective work on the part of Edward Jay Epstein. But wait a minute. No. foliage? There were plenty of leaves on the live-oak (an evergreen) that AP photographer James W. Altgens captured at the top of his picture showing the President of the United States being hit by a bullet on Nov. =, 1963. The photo- graph can be found in any copy of the Warren Report on page 113. � � This is far from the only shortcom- ing. The footnotes are too sparse, the ; documentation is fuzzy, and occasion- ally even the dates Epstein cites are just plain wrong. For a project financed by Reader's Digest, repor- tedly for $500,000, the reader has a right to better scholarship�and to more information. Epstein tells more In his promotional interviews about the book than he does in the book it- self. He assured New York magazine, for instance, that he really doesn't think ' the Russians were involved in JFK's � sassination. "I think that the fact that � Oswald traces so clearly back to the Russians makes it extremely unlikely that they would have recruited him as an assassin," Epstein was quoted as saying in the magazine's March 6 issue. Epstein does write, in an early chap- ter, that "Neither Angleton's shop nor the CIA's Soviet Russia division be- lieved that Oswald was acting under the control of Soviet intelligence when he assassinated the president (In fact, circumstantial evidence seemed to di- minish that possibility.) It seemed far more likely to both that the relation- ship Nosenko was attempting to pro- tect might be a prior connection Os- wald had had with the KGB." That said, Legend marches on conspirato- rially to Nov. 22, 1963 in a chapter. called "The Day of the Assassin," which is the concluding segment of a section subtly titled "The Mission." The book is full of subliminal messages that Epstein avoids gating openly. � What, for instance, are we to think of all those bungled assassination plots against Fidel Castro when they have been hatched in a CIA compromised by a high-ranking enemy "mole"? . Unfortunately, Legend has a perva- sive weakness, a persistent double standard. It keeps assigning omnis- cience to every Soviet move and delib- erate intent to every omission. But what the Ameaican intelliaence agen- cies do and say is usually kissed off in a footnote or mentioned only in passing. Elasteia does not even mention, much less deal with, Nesenko's report to the FBI that the KGB not only had no con- nection. with Oswald, but also sus- pected him of being an American "sleeRer" agents. And 'what of 'Epstein's perhaps use- witting disclosures�in the book and in New York magazine�that Angleton's counterintelligence experts had inter- cepted a stridently anti-American let- ter Oswald wrote to his brother in 1959 and another in which Oswald said he had seen U-2 pilot Francis Gary Pow- ers in Moscow. What's going on here? As late as August 10, 1976, CIA Director George Bush assured a House subcom- mittee that "the only correspondence to or from Oswald that was intercep- ted was one letter, dated 8 July 1961, to Mr. and Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald, from his mother. . �" Perversely, for all its shortcomings, Legend commands serious attention. It is, as one of the publisher's blurbs states, "a 'sensa- tional, highly controversial expose," drawn from a storehouse of declassi- fied documents, including some ob- tained only by Epstein, and interviews with More than 400 people, many of them not interviewed by the Warren Commission. It throws new light on Os- weld's life, especially in Japan where he apparently dated a nightclub host- ess who cost more than his take-home pay and where he reportedly "became involved with a small circle of Japa- nese communists." . ; - . The freshest revelations, however, are those about Nosenko. That they came from Angleton and like-minded. colleagues makes them all the more in- triguing. What former CIA Director. William E. Colby has described as An- gelton's "ultraconspiratorial" view of the world is apparently no longer in vogue at the agency. But if his theories were doubted (Colby, for one, believed they did the CIA more harm than good), his brilliance never was. Even today, no one in the intelligence coms munity seems brash enough to assert that Angleton didn't know what he was talking about He seems to have kept too many secrets to himself; hoarding them like ammunition. In any case, professional disagreement with the CIA's chief of counterintelli- gence was always cautiously stated. In his own forthcoming book, Hon- orable Men:- My Life in the CIA, Colby .puts it this way: "I spent several long sessions doing my best to follow his torturous cone spiracy theories about the long arm of .a powerful and wily KGB at work, over decades, placing its agents in theleart -of allied and neutral nations and send- ing its false defectors to influence and undermine American policy. I confess that I couldn't quite absorb it, possibly � because I did not have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, pos- sibly because Angleton's explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn't add -up to his conclusions; and I finally con- .cluded that the last was the only real -answer. At the same time, I looked in vain for some tangible results in the counterintelligence field, and found little or none. I did not suspect Angle- ton and his staff of .engaging in im- proper activities. I just could not fig- ure out what they were doing at all." Nonetheless, Angleton's - suspicions about Nosenko�at least 32 reported by Epstein�cannot be easily dis- missed. The Russian KGB officer first surfaced as a CIA informant in 1962; ' just six months after another Soviet in- telligence officer, Anatoli M. Golitsin (code name: Stone), had defected with the startling report that a high-rank- ing 'mole" had already 'been planted in the American system. Nosenko, in' effect, assured the CIA that the "mole" was no more than a mouse, a low-rank- ing American military man who once' worked as a motor pool mechanic at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Nosenko's own defection in Febrn- � ary of 1964, with his claims to full knowledge of the KGB case file on Os - weld, led Angleton and other CIA skeptic's to the discovery of one incon- sistency after another. But FBI Direce 1 tor 3. Edgar Hoover wasn't interested. According to Epstein, Hoover was ; more concerned about covering up the FBI's failure to keep a closer watch on ; Oswald before the assassination. "By an odd twist of fate, the FBI's interest lay in concealing, rather than reveal- I lag, any hint of Soviet involvement," Epstein writes. The infighting was evidently fierce. -By the spring of 1964, apparently on the heels of two FBI interviews that took Nosenko at his word, the CIA, re- portedly with the approval of Attor- ney General Robert F. Kennedy, put Nosenko in solitary confinement and began a grueling "hostile Interroga- tion" in hopes that the KGB man I would breetk down before the Wsrren g_QATIA ELM) Conunission had to submit its report The ploy didn't work. The Warren Commission decided not to question Nosenko at all, ostensibly following a � June 24, 1964, conference between Warren and the CIA's Richard Helms. Helms told the chief justice that it was still unclear whether Nosenko was a le- gitimate defector or a Soviet disinf or. mation agent. � � The only trouble with that sequence �� is that the Commission took up the question of Nosenko the day before, on June 23, 1964. Could it have decided . to call Nosenko, Only to have Helms head off the showdown by buttonhol- ing Warren the next morning? No one knows. The CIA has thus far stead- � lastly refused to let the transcript be � made public�on the mind-boggling grounds that the release of any infor- mation about Nosenko "can only inter- fere with American counterintelli- gence efforts." �� The CIA kept hammering away at � Nosenko, keeping him in custody with- out any legal or constitutional author- ity until 1967. His disbelievers in the CIA's Soviet Russia division compiled a 90.0-page report, chronicling all the in- formation he had provided. It con- cluded that he was a fake, assigned by the KGB to mislead the investigators of President Kennedy's assassination:. But Nosenko had his defenders, too,. and they finally prevailed with a 500- page reply that won its author the CIA intelligence medal. For Nosenko, who. Is reputedly under a death sentence in Mother Russia, the Agency provided a e30,000-a-year allowance, a new iden- tity and a new home. Six years later, Epstein writes in a simplistic version' of the event, Angleton was forced into retirement by Colby on the eve of The New ;York Times' disclosure of illicit domestic activities at the agency. An- gleton's top aides were forced out with him. The new counterintelligence � crowd appointed Nosenko one of its consuLtants. Epstein's conclusion is ominous: "With Nosenko accredited and the counterintelligence staff purged, the CIA had truly been turned inside out." �� Oversimplified? Of course. Over- stated? Absolutely. Some truth to the book? Undoubtedly. Where? Who � knows? But watch out for those oak trees. � 0 � GEORGE LARDNER is a reporter on the national staff of . I ��������� � i The Washington Post. �