January 2009
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James Linville
SPY WARS by Tennant H. Bagley
Thursday 24th July 2008
... last month marked the paperback publication of Tennant H. Bagley's SPY WARS, an extraordinary book urged upon me by journalist Ed Epstein. Last year the book was selected by NYT's William Safire (who called it a "bombshell") as "sleeper book of the year." I've read the book twice, and am still digesting the implications of this complex story.
An old-school espionage story from the early Cold War, “Pete” Bagley was the counter-intelligence officer who handled the noted case of the defector Yuri Nosenko. The question of whether Nosenko was a bona fide defector, or had been dispatched as part of a deception plot, tore the CIA apart for the better part of a decade. Some forty years later Bagley finally makes public his report, and it diverges considerably from the comfortable version of events the agency has long presented.
In The Spectator, Oleg Gordievsky described the author, one-time head of Soviet Block Counter-Intelligence for the CIA, as "one of the most respected and knowledgeable experts on Soviet espionage." The book, he said, was "perhaps the most amazing non-fiction spy book that has ever appeared during or after the Cold War."
After my second reading I turned to a series of "twenty unavoidable questions" posed by Bagley (to be found on the Yale Press website, at the bottom of the page HERE).
Bagley's questions are indeed unavoidable. What's more, his account was persuasive that the Russian defector could not have been who he said he was; that Nosenko could not have, as he’d claimed, reviewed the file of Lee Harvey Oswald; and that Nosenko's stories of how the KGB discovered the identities of two CIA moles in Moscow could not have been true. David Ignatius in the Washington Post wrote, "It's impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko's bona fides. Spy Wars should reopen the Nosenko case." I don't know what it would mean to "open" a case forty years old, but certainly a new generation of analysts and historians should examine the case. The account of the long history of deception operations, stretching back to Peter the Great, is alone worth the price of the book.
So, why did the Soviet's concoct such a deception? In the book Bagley argues that the KGB's real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited an American code clerk in Moscow in 1949, and perhaps two others later on.
A code clerk... that's it? Or even three? Consider, then, that during WWII the Allies ability to read the German intentions through British capture of an Enigma encryption device helped give us the capacity to win that war.
One might now ask, as Ignatius does, What mind games are the Russian playing with us today?
An old-school espionage story from the early Cold War, “Pete” Bagley was the counter-intelligence officer who handled the noted case of the defector Yuri Nosenko. The question of whether Nosenko was a bona fide defector, or had been dispatched as part of a deception plot, tore the CIA apart for the better part of a decade. Some forty years later Bagley finally makes public his report, and it diverges considerably from the comfortable version of events the agency has long presented.
In The Spectator, Oleg Gordievsky described the author, one-time head of Soviet Block Counter-Intelligence for the CIA, as "one of the most respected and knowledgeable experts on Soviet espionage." The book, he said, was "perhaps the most amazing non-fiction spy book that has ever appeared during or after the Cold War."
After my second reading I turned to a series of "twenty unavoidable questions" posed by Bagley (to be found on the Yale Press website, at the bottom of the page HERE).
Bagley's questions are indeed unavoidable. What's more, his account was persuasive that the Russian defector could not have been who he said he was; that Nosenko could not have, as he’d claimed, reviewed the file of Lee Harvey Oswald; and that Nosenko's stories of how the KGB discovered the identities of two CIA moles in Moscow could not have been true. David Ignatius in the Washington Post wrote, "It's impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko's bona fides. Spy Wars should reopen the Nosenko case." I don't know what it would mean to "open" a case forty years old, but certainly a new generation of analysts and historians should examine the case. The account of the long history of deception operations, stretching back to Peter the Great, is alone worth the price of the book.
So, why did the Soviet's concoct such a deception? In the book Bagley argues that the KGB's real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited an American code clerk in Moscow in 1949, and perhaps two others later on.
A code clerk... that's it? Or even three? Consider, then, that during WWII the Allies ability to read the German intentions through British capture of an Enigma encryption device helped give us the capacity to win that war.
One might now ask, as Ignatius does, What mind games are the Russian playing with us today?
9:49 pm
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COMMENTS
jlinville
July 24th, 2008
9:07 PM
9:07 PM
WSJ journalist Melik Kaylin, responding to the above sent us this cryptic but interesting missive:
Regarding our naive consumption of the Russian version of things, too true. I remember during the 1990's discussing the various wars in the Caucasus with fellow western journalists and being constantly reassured by them that Russia was a cripple helplessly watching as parts of itself broke off. And yet in the Abkhazia war the Russians managed to organize a transnational military to fight the Georgians to help Abkhazia secede from Georgia. In Chechnya, in Nagorno-karabgh this helpless giant managed to maneuver things its way and we were always persuaded that it all happened by accident. It was partly the Clinton administration's aversion to a sustained foreign policy (how unlucky the post-Cold War US has been in its foreign policy Presidents) so we were not supposed to notice the evolving pattern (as with the BinLaden threat), But it was also Russian strategy. Here's an odd fact. Between the Chechen wars, a friend was reporting on the region for WSJ. She remembers being on a private chartered flight with only three people: herself, a top Syrian official and a top Saudi official - all flying to Chechnya from Moscow. They didnt tell her what they were about but soon after, the Islamization of the Chechen resistance was complete, the Russians intelligence people bombed a series of domestic apartment blocks and blamed it on the Chechens, and they had the excuse for the second Chechen war - which they won.
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