Fictoid Launching Pad: Newsweek
On November 18, 1985, In a cover story about the KGB
defector Vitaliy
Yurchenko, Newsweek suggested that James
Jesus Angleton, the former chief of the CIA's
counterintelligence staff, had been responsible for
the incarceration of Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko, a 47-year
old KGB officer, had defected to the United States and
claimed to have been the KGB officer in charge of the
case of Lee
Harvey Oswald yet another cold war
defector who resided in Russia prior to assassinating
President John F. Kennedy.
Newsweek reported "Convinced that Nosenko was
a Soviet plant, he kept him in solitary confinement
for more than three years." The proximate source
for the charge was a claim in the autobiography of Admiral
Stansfield Turner, who had come to the CIA
more than a decade after the event, that "Angleton's
counterintelligence team set out to break" Nosenko.
The story of Angleton, who had become emblematic of
the deepest conspiracy-thinking in the CIA, locking
up in an isolated cell, a KGB officer who might be able
to shed light on the JFK mystery, not only had legs
in the news media, but was graphically depicted in a
fictive movie shown on HBO entitled "Yuri Nosenko,
KGB," starring Tommy Lee Jones.
Despite its authoritative rendering, the story was
a fictoid. Angleton did not order the arrest, imprisonment
or hostile interrogation of Yuri Nosenko. Nor did he,
or his counterintelligence staff, even have jurisdiction
over the Nosenko case, which was the exclusive responsibility
of the CIA's Soviet Russia Division. Nor did they participate
in it (other than being informed of the decision.)
What happened in 1964, as is unambiguously set forth
in his congressional testimony, is that the chief of
that division, David Murphy made the decision to imprison
Nosenko without consulting Angleton. Murphy testified
that he was concerned that Nosenko might re-defect to
Russia and launch "a massive propaganda assault
on the CIA." Murphy then got the approval of Richard
Helms, the director of the covert side of the CIA, and
Lawrence Houston, the CIA's legal counsel. Since the
CIA did not have the power to arrest anyone in the U.S.,
Murphy, Helms and Houston then went to the Justice Department
and asked Deputy U.S. Attorney-General Nicholas Katzenbach
for legal approval from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
to imprison Nosenko. Nosenko had been brought into the
U.S. on "parole" to the CIA, and, on this
basis, Kennedy authorized the detention of Nosenko.
Nosenko was the only case on record in which the CIA
imprisoned someone. Consequently, it became the subject
of an investigation by both the Rockefeller Commission
and the House Select Committee on Intelligence. A half
dozen CIA officials involved in the detention testified
under oath. All clearly stated that the Soviet Russia
division, not the counterintelligence staff, recommended
the arrest, and Angleton himself was not part of the
process.
Angleton was informed of the decision by Newton Miler,
his liaison with the Soviet Russia division. Miler later
recounted to Samuel Halpern and Hayden Peake, who were
investigating the issue, that that Angleton not only
had no role in the arrest, but opposed the "hostile
interrogation approach." He further explained that
Admiral Turner was wrong in attributing the hostile
interrogation to Angleton's "counterintelligence
team," and, in fact, "no CI staff personnel
ever interrogated Nosenko or interviewed Nosenko from
1964 to 1975." What Turner evidently had confused
was the Soviet Russia Division's counterintelligence
team, which conducted the interrogation, with Angleton's
staff, which had no access to Nosenko.
To its credit, Newsweek effectively corrected its story
in its letters column (December 23,1985, p.12), noting
"Newsweek regrets the error."
The fictoid did not, however, fade away in other newspapers.
As recently as January 2, 2002, The New York Times featured
an article on its Op Ed page by Tom Mangold re-asserting
that Angleton had violated the constitutional rights
of Nosenko by having him "arrested and thrown into
solitary confinement." The Times published this
fictoid even though it was inconsistent with Mangold's
own prior account inn his book "Cold Warrior"
in which he writes (page 189) that after Nosenko arrived
in the US, "Richard Helms and David Murphy began
preparations to imprison the Soviet defector and start
hostile interrogations." In the New York Times,
he changed "Richard Helms and David Murphy"
to "Angleton." And since the newspaper of
record had not corrected this switch, the fictoid had
been perpetuated into the third millennium.
(For a more detailed account, Samuel Halpern and Hayden
Peake, "Did Angleton Jail Nosenko?" International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Winter
1989. For testimony, Select Committee on assassinations,
House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 2nd session,
1979 Volume XII.pp531-5)
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