This year the Raleigh Spy Conference focused on “CIA’s Unsolved Mysteries: The Nosenko Defection, Double Agents and Angleton’s Wilderness of Mirrors.”
James Angleton was the chief of counter intelligence at CIA during the hottest years of the cold war. The CIA’s Chief Historian David Robarge separated fact from fiction regarding Angleton. The model for many spy novel characters, Angleton was highly secretive in his search for a mole inside CIA. He never found the mole, but the careers of two notorious traitors, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, were documented by former CIA officer Brian Kelley who at one time was mistakenly accused of being a mole.
Conference speakers had a heated debate over the 1964 defection of Yuri Nosenko. Pete Bagley who interrogated Nosenko challenged CIA orthodoxy that Nosenko was a valid defector. Bagley documents his view in his book, “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games.” He believes that Nosenko was a KGB agent sent to the US to calm US fears regarding Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union shortly before he assassinated Kennedy. Nosenko claimed that the KGB had no contact with Oswald while he was in the Soviet Union. Bagley noted that this along with many other holes in Nosenko’s story tipped him off to the bogus defection. His real mission, Bagley believes, was to provide false information in order to disrupt US intelligence operations.
The N&O’s story on the conference is here.
