Agency: HSCA
Originator: HSCA
From: BAGLEY, TENNENT
Document date: 09/15/1978
Document type: TRANSCRIPT

## Page 1

JFK Assassination System

Identification Form

Agency Information

Date:

4/28/201

AGENCY :

RECORD NUMBER :

RECORD SERIES :

AGENCY FILE NUMBER:

HSCA

180-10147-10245

CIA SEGREGATED COLLECTION

63-05-02

Document Information

ORIGINATOR:

FROM:

TO :

TITLE:

HSCA

BAGLEY, TENNENT

Released under

the John

F. Kennedy

Assassination Records

Collection Act of 1992

i44 USC 2107 Note).

Case#:NW 53080 Date:

06-05-2017

DATE: 09/15/1978

PAGES:

169

SUBJECTS :

BAGLEY, TENNENT

• CIA, FILES

OSWALD, LEE, RUSSIAN PERIOD

NOSENKO, YURI

KGB

DOCUMENT TYPE: TRANSCRIPT

CLASSIFICATION: Unclassified

RESTRICTIONS: 1A; 1B

CURRENT STATUS : Redact

DATE OF LAST REVIEW: 09/07/1995

OPENING CRITERIA :

COMMENTS :

Box 36

v9.1

AH 53080

DocId: 32273600

Page 1

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## Page 2

EXECUTIVE SESSION

ORIGINAL

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

HEARINGS

BEFORE THE COMMITTEE

OnL

SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS

Subcom tree, on Assassination of President John Fa kennedia

ASSASS I NATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN P. KENNEDY

TOURER SEISSTON

Washington.D.. 0c

Thursday November 16, 1978

Official Reporters to Committees

3510=÷78107-

BALCULT VE SESSION

2/989

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## Page 3

25a Avenue de l'Orée - Bte. 10

Lose grussels,

Belgium

relechone: 649-7221

Octobe= 11, 1978

Mr. G. Robert Blakey

Chief Counsel and Director

Select Committee on Assassinations

House of Representatives

Washington, D. C.

NW 53080 DooId: 32273600

Dear MI. Blakey,

I have read. the transcript of the testimony of

the CIA's representative, Me.

John I. Hart, before

your Committee on

september 15,, 1978.

As the former deputy chief of the CIA's Soviet

Bloc Division, so prominently and so disparagingly

featured in that testimony,

be able to nelp

the Committee to judge CIA's investigation of Lee

Harvey Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union, as

recoited by Yuri Nosenko.

Specifically, I can correct

certain misleading

impressions left by MI. Hart. I would call to your

attention at least twenty eriors, fifteen misleading

statements, and ten important omissions in his

testi

опу, палу

of them pertinent to your task and,

together, distorting the entire picture.

Having been publicly dishonored by unfounded

statements before your Committee, I ask for the

courtesy of an opportunity to come before the

Committee, publicly if you are to hold more public

hearings,

to answer not only for myself but also

for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has

we not

misrepresented its own performance.

I mention below a few of the points of error

and distortion, leaving many others to be discussed

in person with the Committee. My comments refer to

the line numbers in the draft transcript of Mr. Hart's

testimony, and are keyed to the Committee's trofold

purpose as you defined it: of evaluating the perfor-

mance of the Agency and of weighing the credibility

of MI. Nosenko.

For clarity I have subdivided these

as follows:

1) Effectiveness of CIA's pesformance:

a) in getting the facts about Oswald from Nosenko,

b) in investigating these facts.

2) Credibility:

a) of MI. Hosenko's statements about Oswald,

b) of MI. Nosenko as a source.

Page 3

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## Page 4

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After discussing briefly each of these points,

I will make, below, a few general comments on the

CIA testimony, and

will address myself to the matter

of Nosenko's treatment.

CIA's performance in dettino the facts from Nosenko

The Committee Staff Report describes accurately

the CIA's performance in this particular aspect of

its responsibility.

Referring to the Agency's ques-

tioning of Nosenko on July? and july 27 were detailed

says on page 7. that the CIA's questions

and specific about Nosenko's knowledge of Oswald. The

questions were chronological and an attempt was

to touch all aspects of Oswald's stay in the Soviet

Union." Moreover, CIA gave Nosenko a transcript of

his own remarks so he could add anything more he knew

or correct any errors. (Staff Report; pages 8-9)

MI. Hart's confusing testimony had the effect of

changing the Committee's appraisal. Not only giving

the Agency a "zero" rating on all aspects of

this

case, he stated flatly that "There was no effort

being made to get at more information he might have."

(lines 2848-9)

He thus led MI. Fithian to suggest

that the cIA had

not even

taken "the logical first

step" of getting Nosenko's information (3622-3)

led the Chairman to

conclude that no investigation

of Oswald's activities as known to Mosenko had been

made. (4095-8) In this MI. Hart concurred: (4100)

In fact, CIA got from Nosenko all he had to say.

about Oswald. CIA's reports contained no less than

those of the

FBI, who questioned Mosenko as long

they thought they needed to.

Your Committee seems

to have been satisfied that in its 21 to 24 hours

with Nosenko it, too, had got everything he had to

say •

That added only one new fact, about the kGB's

voluminous surveillance reports on

oswald, which

contradicted Nosenko's earlier reports and, as the

Staff Report notes, in turn contradicted another

aspect of Nosenko's story: that the KCB didn't watch

Oswald enough to learn of his courtship of Marina.

One wonders, therefore, whether Me. Hart would

give your Committee a similar "dismal" or "zero" rating.

In fact, of course, there

was nothing more to be

got from Nosenko. If there had been, CIA would have

gone doggedly after it, just as the FI and your

Committee would have.

Your Staff Report said that

Nosenko "recited" the same story in each of his

I 53080 DocId: 32273500e pagesions with the Committee. The word is apt:

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## Page 5

Nosenko had "recited" that story before, to CIA and

FBI, each of whom questioned him carefully and

systematically about it.

It is difficult, then,

to accept the new judgment

that CIA's performance on this aspect deserved a "zero."

It could only be a result of confusion engendered by

MI. Hart.

CIa's performance in investigating Nosenko's reports

on Oswald

By alleging general prejudice and misunderstanding

on the part of CIA personnel handling this case, Mi.

part confused the committee on the specisic question

of CIA's investigation of Nosenko's intormation.

When MI. Fithian asked specifically whether the

CIA had made

any attempt to verify Nosenko's informa-

tion on Oswald's KGB contacts, Me. Hart replied yes,

but then interjected an irrelevant

statement about

"climate" of "sick think"; his aim was

presumably o

leave the impression that even if another Keß man

had confirmed Nosenko's statements on Oswald, these

dismal CIA people wouldn't have believed him. (3666)

Later MI. Hat backed off even this degree of appro-

bation, hinting that maybe, after all, CIa didn't

investigate at all:

"No such file (showing investi-

gation via other defectors) came to my attention." (4177)

But MI. Hart knew very well that no other defectors

knew

about Oswald's connections with the keb.I

The truth lies in the warren Commission report,

cited in lines 4146-9, that CIA just didn't have other

sources in the kGB or

elsewhere in the USSR in a

position to check Nosenko's story. This is not quite

the same thing as saying, as the Chairman did, that

"We now. know that the CIA did not investigate what

Nosenko did tell them about Oswald in Russia." (4166)

The confusion stems from MI. Hart's testimony.

If CIA's failure to have on tap another spy in

the KGB who knew about the Oswald case constitutes

"dismal" performance, then that should be so stated.

The record'as it stands, at least in the transcript,

casts an unjustified slur on Cla's performance in

this particular aspect of its task.

By the way, the coincidence that the CIA had

even one KGB source on Oswald in Russia is worth the

Committee's notice. Of the many thousands of KGB

Defectors knowledgeable of internal USSR procedures

---

## Page 6

-4-

people throughout the

world, CIA had secret relations

with only one, and this one

turned out to have

participated directly in the Oswald case.

once, but on

two separate occasions: when Oswald

came to Russia in 1959 and again after the assassi

nation when the Kremlin leadership caused a

Rave review of the whole kee tale on Oswale fou

many KGB men could say

unbelievably lucky to

Warren Commission at all. In view of other suspi-

cions of Nosenko, the key word in that last sentence

is "unbelievably'")

Credibility of Nosenko's statements about Oswald

The Committee's Staff Report ably pointed out

the

contradictions between Hosenko's various

state-

ments.

MI. Hart admitted, under MI. Dodd's insistent

pressure, that Nosenko's testimony

about oswald was

"implausible" and even "incredible." (3431, 4353,4396)

He went so fai

• as to recommend that it be disregarded.

(3426,.3438,3467)

However,

Mo. Hart exhorted you to believe in the

best of Nosenko's reporting and to believe in Mi.

Nosenko's good faith. (2556,3252-78, 3348-55) In other

words, he assured you that Nosenko's incredible and

unusable testimony about Oswald did not come as a

message from

the Ke3 but only from the confused mind

of CIA's advisor. Therefore, Mr. Hart would have you

disregard it rather than read it in reverse.

To support this recommendation MI. Hart said:

"I cannot offhand remember any statements which he

has been proven to have made which were statements

of real substance other than the contradictions which

have been adduced todav on the Lee Harvey oswald

matter, which have been proven to be incorzect." (3253-8)

But the Committee only spoke to Nosenko about this

one matter. Even so, the Committee detected no less

than four or five contradictions. Could this, by

extraordinary coincidence, be the only such case?

When it confronted Nosenko. with his contradictions,

the Committee encountered the range of Nosenko's excuses

and evasions - even before the CIA sent Mr. Hart to

nake these same excuses for Nosenko. Nosenko told the

1

Is menory serves, there was a third occasioni96l when

Did not Nosenko happen to be in the room in

a cable arrived in Moscow concerning Oswald's visa

application in Mexico City?

1TH

53080 DooId: 32273600

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-5-

Committee that he'd been misunderstood, that he didn't

understand

english, that

he'd been under stress,

drugged, or hallucinating.. He would

evade the question,

saying

you shouldn't ask him what he'd said before, but

should ask about the conditions he'd been kept in.

MI. Hart's testimony must then have resounded like

ah

• echo in the Committee room.

Nosenko even told the Committee staff that he

couldn't remember what he had said before.

The oddity

of this will not have escaped the Committee's notice.

It shouldn't matter what he'd said before; he was

supposedly talking of things he'd lived through: the

Kes files he'd seen, the officers he'd worked with.

If these were real experiences he need only recall

then and his reports would, all by themselves, come

out more or less the same

way each time (withir

normal of abnormal limits of memory, and personality

quirks, of which we are all almost

as aware as Mi. Hart).

As the

Committee learned,

Nosenko's reports did

come out straight,

so Nosenko resorted to this bizarre

excuse - which

nakes the story appear nore learned

than experienced.

Nonetheless

the CIA

asks the Committee to take

its word

that this is the only time such things

happened,

the only such testimony by Nosenko that

need be disregarded. But this is particularly

difficult to accept on such an important matter.

The Oswald affair, after all, was exciting worldwide

interest, and at the time of

the XG3's file review,

Nosenko was already a willing secret collaborator of

the CIA. One might

expect his powers of retention to

work unusually well here.

Yet it is precisely on

this matter that CIa tells you that Mosenko was

uniquely fuzzy.

What the CIA did not tell the Committee, what

was hidden behind MI. Hart's 'offhand" inability to

remember other such bad performances by Nosenko-the-

man-of-good-faith, was that this performance was in

no wav unusual. It was simply the way Nosenko reactec

whenever he was interrogated in detail on important

matters. Not only the contradictions, not only the

changes in the story, but the excuses

and evasions as

well: all were standard Nosenko.

This brings us to the next suoject.

credibilitv of nosenko as a source

This is clearly important to the Committe,

which

must decide whether Nosenko's contradictory testimony

on Oswald was an aberration, as the CIA pleaded, or

HH 53080 DocId: 32226mlSBager from the KGB.

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## Page 8

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Here are a few of the errors in the CIa testimony

which might affect your decision:

1) MI. Hart said, after having reviewed every detail

of the case for six months with the aid of four assis-

tants, "I see no reason to think that he has ever told

an untruth, except because he didn't remember it or

didn't know or during those times when he was under

the influence of alcohol he exaggerated." (3352)

Comment: Ten years removed from this case, I can

still remember at least twenty clear cases: of

Nosenko's lying about kgs activity and about the

career which gave him authority to tell of it,

and a dozen examples of his ignorance of matters

within his claimed area of responsibility, or

which there is no innocent explanation.

Never, before this testimony by Mr. Hast,

was drinking

adduced

as an excuse for Nosenko's

false reporting. He had no alcohol in his

detention, during which he was questioned, as

MI. Hart reminds us, for 292 days.

And not by

the wildest excess of faith or creculity can

all of the contradictions and compromising

circumstances of the Nosenko case (none of which,

oddly enough,

did Mr. Hart mention) be attriouted

to Nosenko's

faulty memory, which Mr. Hart seemed

at such pains to establish.

2) MI. Hart said that the suspicions of dosenko azose

from the paranoid imaginings

and jealousy of a previous

defector, whom he calls "K". Mr. Hart told you

"MI. X's views were immediately taken to be the

definitive view of Nosenko and from that point on,

the treatment of Mr. Nosenko was never, until 1967,

devoted to learning what MI. Nosenko said."

(2404-29,2488-91)

Comments:

a) It was not X's theories which caused my initial

suspicion of Nosenko in 1962. It was the overlap

of Nosenko's reports lat first glance entirely

convincing and important) with those given six

months earlier by X.

Alone, Nosenko looked good

(as MI. Hart said, 2375-9, 2397-8); seen alongside

s, whose reporting I had not previously seen,

Mosenko looked very odd indeed. The matters

overlapped were serious ones, including a specific

lead to penetration of CIA (not

a general allega-

tion,

as Mr. Hart misleadingly suggested on lines

2419-21)•

There were at least a dozen such points

of overlap, of which I can still remember at least

iN 53080 DocId:32273600ePadta Nosenko's

information tended to negate or

--

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## Page 9

-7=

b) Later, our suspicions of Nosenko were deepened

by concrete

matters, not paranoid suppositions,

and many of these lay outside Nosenko's own

story and hence not explicable by his boasting,

drinking, or whatnot.

c) Mr. Hart said that

X "was

masterminding the

examinations in many ways." (2457) In fact X

played no role at all in our "examinations"

although he submitted a

few questions and comments

from time to time.

The testimony of CIA on this

point is inexplicable; its falsity must have been

evident in the files MI. Hart's team perusad.

d) It is simply not true that "the treatment of

Nosenko was not devoted to learsing what Me.

Nosenko said."

In the Oswald matter alone the

Committee has the record of careful, systematic

questionings in January and July 1964.

care was devoted to his other information.

results fill some of those forty file drawers to

which Mr. Hart referred.

3) Mr. Hart stated, "Quantitatively and qualitatively,

the inforuation given by Mr. X was much smaller than

that given by Nosenko."

(2470)

Comments:

This breathtaking misstatement hides the fact

chat Mr.s, paranold of not, provided in the firsi

months after his defection information nich leo

to the final uncovering of kim Philoy,

to the

detection of several important penetrations of

Western European governments, proof (not allegation)

of penetration at the most sensitive level of

French Intelligence, and pointers to serious

penetrations of the U. S. Government.

MI. X gave, before Nosenko, the curzent

organization and methods of the kGB, and it was

MI. X who first revealed both of the

two kea

operations which MI. Hart adduced as proof of

Nosenko's good faith. (See (4) and (5) below.)

To be charitable to MI. Hart, he acmitted to

the Committee (2434)

that he is

"not an expert

on MI. X's case."

His testimony, however, suggests

that he has not read the references to x 1n the

Nosenko files.

HH 53080 DocId:32273600 Page 9

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## Page 10

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4) MI. Hart stated, "MI. Nosenko was responsible for

the discovery of a

system of microphones within the

U.S. Embassy

•in Moscow which had hitherto been

suspected but nobody had enough information on it

to actually detect it." (2328-32)

Comments:

a) MI. X had given approximate locations of some

of the microphones six months earlier. Neither

he nor Nosenko knew precise locations,

but poth

knew the mikes were there and both could indicate

some specific offices where they coulá be founá.

The actual tearing out of walls, which

Mr. Fart

describes, would have been done, and the micro-

phone "systen" found, without rosenko's information.

b) Contrary to MI. Hart's statement (2350-3) the

KGB would "throw away" already-compromised infor-

mation to build up a

source.

MI. Hart simply hid

frem you the fact that this information was

already compromised when Hosenko delivered it.

c) These microphones were all in the "old wing" of

the ambassy.

Nosenko also said, and carefully

explained why, to microphones were installed in

the "new wing."

Mr. Edward Jay Epstein, in his

book Legend, says

that 134 microphones

were later

there.

I think this can be checked, via

the State Department. It would seem

to have been

CIa's responsibility to tell you about this, once

they had raised

the subject of microphones to

support Nosenko's bona fides.

5) MI. Hait said

"A very high level kGs penetzation

in a very sensitive position in a western Buropean

government was, on the basis of MI. Nosenko's lead,

arrested, tried, and convicted of espionage.

is no reason to believe that the soviets would have

given this information away'' (2354-62)

Comments:

MI. Hart was presumably referring to

a man we can here call

"y",

although I do not

entirely understand his reticence, for this case

is very well known to the public.

Mr. Hart nas made two misstatements here:

a) y's reports to the Kes were

• to ME. X,

and the case had thus been exposed

six months before

Nosenko reported to CIA..

The KGB, recognizing this, cut off contact with

Y immediately aster

X's defection. Y's

eventual

uncovering was inevitable,

• though i had

not known his name.

Nosenko added one item of

HH 53080 DocId: 32273600 PageAformation which

permitted y to be caugne sooner,

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## Page 11

-9-

b) Therefore, "eason to believe that the

contrary to the CIA testimony,

there is a

Soviets would have given this information

away."

The reason - that Y was already

compromised - was perfectly clear in the

files which Mr. Hart's team

studied.

6) MI. Hart told you that Mr. X had confirmed Nosenko's

claimed positions in the KGB. (2431)

Comment:

MI. X saia, on the contrary, that he nad

personally visited the American-ambassy section of

the KGB during the period 1950-61 when Nosenko claimed

to have been its deputy chief. X knew definitely

that Nosenko was not serving there.

7) MI. Hast said that. DO/SB "had built up a picture

which

was based on a good deal of historical research

about a plot against the west." (4809)

Comment: Like point (2) above,

this is part of CIA's

effort to belittle the case against Nosenko. My

bicture" of Nosenko's role as

a KGB provocateur was

based on concrete factors, which as I have said above

cannot be explained by Nosenko's personality laws

or memory.

it was not based on "historical research,"

as MI. Hart knew very well -- although it is, in fact,

supported by a long history of soviet actions of

this sort.

At this point a word may be in order about Mi.

Hart's contemptuous reference to "historical research."

As I mentioned above, Nosenko's information in 1962

overlapped and deflected leads given shortly before

by X, concerning spies in the J.S. Governmant.

a KGB paper of this

period, serhaps what MI. Fart

would call a historical document, described the need

for disinformation (deception) in KGB counterintelli-

gence work. It stated that just catching

• American

spies isn't enough, for the enemy can always stat again

with new ones.

Therefore, said this kGb document,

disinformation operations

are essential. And among

the purposes of such operations, as

I recall the words

of the document, the first

one mentioned is "to negate

and discredit authentic infosmation the enemy has

obtained."

I believe that

Nosenko's mission in 1962

involved just that: covering and protecting KGB

sources threatened by X's defection.

Does this sound

like a "horrendous plot" conjured up by paranoids?

It is a straightiorward counterespionage technique,

perfectly understandable to

laymen.

But Mr: Hart's

purpose was not enlightenment,

but ridicule.

HH 53080 DocId:32273600 Page 11

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## Page 12

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The last of the four or five purposes the secret

KGB document listed (purposes of counterintelligence

disinformation operations) was "to penetrate deeper

into the enemy service." By taking on MI. Nosenko

as a counselor, the CIa may have helped the KGB

achieve

this goal, as well

as the first one.

What conclusions can be drawn from these and

similar errors in the CIA testimony?

I would submit that despite these efforts to

deride and dismiss the arguments against Nosenko,

there is,

as MI. Helms testified,

a solid case

against Nosenko, of which the implications are very

serious.

The country is not well served by Mr.

Hart's superficial and offhand dismissal of that case.

For if Nosenko is a nes plant,

as I am convinced

he is, there can be no doubt that Mosenko's recited

story

about Oswald in the USSR is a message from the

KGB. That message says,

in exaggerated

and implausible

form, that Oswald had nothing whatever to do with the

кез,

not questioned for his military intelligence,

not even screened as a possible CIA plant.. Even Mi.

Hart finds it incredible and recommends that you

disregard

it.

But his reasons are flawed,

and can

you afford to disregará it?

Sy sending out such a

message,

the KG3

exposes the fact that it has something

to hide.

As MI. Helms told you, that something may

be the fact that Oswald was an agent of the kGa:

The form and tone of the CIA testinony

comet de ago or cale rare degrees

The Committee and the puolic must have been struck

dumb by the spectacle of a government agency falling

over itself to cast mud on its own performance of duty.

When Mr. Dodd asked MI. Hart if CIA had "failed

in its responsibility miserably," MI. Hart replied,

in a classic of government advocacy,

"Congressman,..•

I would go further than that." (3188)

MI. Hart's testimony -- one-sided, intemperate,

distorted -- was carefully structured to influence

rather than inform the Committee:

NW 53080 DocId: 32273600 Page 12

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## Page 13

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MI. Hart went to special pains to force your

thinking into a certain framework.

He began his

testimony defensively, citing all

the factors which

might have caused this defector to bear false witness:

stresses, bad

memory, drunkenness, the traumas of

defection (shared, by the way, by

all defectors), and

even the "unreality of his situation." (2634)

then on to the revelations of mistreatment, which

you are to accept as dismissing all evidence against

Nosenko.

"It is with (these mitigating factors) in

mind that we have to approach everything that

happened from 1962" (2498-9), plus of course the

sheer bumbling incompetence

' o¿ Nosenko's handling.

On the one hand CIa attacked with venom its own

past performance, and on the other hand adopted an

almost beseeching

tone in defending a Soviet KGa

person who, by CIA's own admission, had rendered

Invalid testimony about the assassin of an American

president.

"You should believe these statements of ME.

Nosenko," MI. Hart said. (3252)

"Anything

that he

has said has

been said in good faith." (3350)

"I am only asking you to believe that he made

(his statements) in good faith." (3275) "I am

hoping that once these

misunderstandings are

explained, that many of the problems...which the

staff has

had with

the questions and answers from

Nosenko, and also allegations concerning hin,

will be cleared up and go away." (2124-31)

Confronted by MI. Dodd with the specific contra-

dictions which made Nosenko's story unacceptable,

MI. Hast fell back on declarations of faiti. (3425, 3349)

In the heat of his defense of Nosenko and his

attack on Nosenko's questioners, Mr. Hart jumbled

together the conditions of 1962

(alleged drunkenness)

with those of the confinement, leading Mi. Dodo to

lay importance on Nosenko's drinking. (3243-4) He

got over to Mr. Dodd the idea that hallucinations

"probably" (3241) influenced Nosenko's performance

under interrogation lby a subtle turn of phase.

lines 2870-73) - while knowing that hallucinations

were never a factor in the question-and-answer sessions.

Noting that the CIA medical officer concluded that

Nosenko had feigned his hallucinations (in periods

of isolation) Mr. Hart could not restrain a

knee-jerk

defense,

"but that was simply one medical officer's

opinion. " (2864)

And finally, by spending his testi-

mony on the nandling of Nosenko,

and the mistreatment,

he succeeded

in skirting all the facts of the case

which are, after all, your concert.

HH 53080 DocId: 32273600 Page 13

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## Page 14

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MI. Hart's

emotional closing message (4883) with

its catchy word

"abomination," epitomizes his whole

testimony.

That testimony shows none of the detachment of

a self-styled

I "historian" proud of his high standards

of scholarship. (4106)

It sounds more like a man

pleading

a flimsy cause, urgently trying to make

a point.

Fe left with the Committee, and the public,

carried away by wild fantasies about horrendous plots,

failing even to ask questions, much less to check out

the answers, while hiding their vile

illegal thoughts from a duped leadershiy.

Since these impressions provide the background

foI MI. Hart's description of the handling of

Nosenko, they may be worth a closer look.

He created at least three impressions about the

handling of the Nosenko case:

1) That it was the work of an isolated group of lates-

ponsible people

Specifically, Me. Hart repeated

that it was

"small group of people...a very limited group" (2509)

handling the case on the basis of a "belief" held

closely by "a very small trusted group." (25I8)

He gets over strongly the impression that Mr. Helms

not properly informed. (4619,3996-4019,4632)

Contrary to Mi. Hart's testinony,

discussed with all elements concerned; suggestions were

solicited, decisions were worked out in consultation.

The leadership did not lose contIol or confidence.

If, Indeed, the group concerned with the suspicions

of Nosenko remained

"very small" it was because is

Nosenko was

a Kes plant,

there was a KGB spy within

CIA.

This is not the sort of thing one wants to

spread widely.

2) That it was the work of incompetents

MI. Hat succeeded in getting over to the committee

and the public an image of gross

incompetence on the

part of Nosenko's

handlers.

He led Mr.

boca, for example,

to ask if any of "these characters" are

"still kickIng

around the agency, of have they been fired?" (4232) and

to suggest that even if there had been a KGb conspiracy,

we would not have been competent to detect it. (4199)

NN 53080 DooId:32273600 Page 14

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MI. Hart got over this impression of incompetence

in three ways:

a)

By repeating general, intemperately derogatory

judoments and Labels:

He called the handling

of "the entire case" (3189) - including the

competent parts noted above -- "zero"

"miserable"

"dismal," "counterproductive," and so

forth,

and hinted that the handlers

were pIone to

wild

fancies and illegal conduct.

b) By withholdine facts: Certain information Me.

Hart knew

and failed

• to mention might have caused

the committee to wonder whether, aiter aid,

there might be more to this than the simplistic

picture MI. Hart drew. For example,

he did not

tell MI. Dodd the following about "these characters":

(1) That the people managing this complex case

were senior officers with perhaps the most

experience within the entire Agency in

handling Soviet Bloc counterespionage natters.

That neither C/S3 nor DC/SB

tended to see

shadows

where they weren't.

In our tany

dealings with Soviet Bloc intelligence officers

as defectors of agents-in-place, we had, before

Nosenko, never judged any

of them to be

plants.

If anything, I have been reproached

for trusting

them too far, as more than one

defector will probably be

willing to testify.

13) That in our service in positions of responsi

bility before, during,

and after this affair,

our performance was rated as superior, as

CIs personnel records will confirm..

If memory

serves, even Mr. Hart judged my performance

(and probably C/SB's) after this case as

"outstanding." I was decorated for my service.

By giving vou false and misleadina information:

Here are at least lour examples:

(1) Mr. Hart told the Committee the outright untruth

that the work of C/SB and DC/SB "on this case

had been discredited and had caused them to be

transferred out of Headquarters to foreign

assignments." (2529) We can produce witnesses,

if necessary,

to prove that this is false.

Any "disczediting" came later, by Mi. Hart

and others.

we had asked, long in advance,

for our particular assignments and got them

when the posts came open in the normal course

NN 53080 DocId:32273600 Page 191 events, both of us after long headquaiters

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(2) MI. Hart introduced a red herring about my

Russian-language competence,

which so misled

MI. Fithian that he spoke, without rebuttal

oy fart, about an "English speaking person

tIving

to take notes and wilting down what

this major potential defector was saying and

then transcribing them and giving them to the

agency,

right down through the interrogation."

(3648-52) He led MI. Dodd, too, to think

there were "no verbatim accounts of some of

the interrogations but rather notes taken by

people who didn't have a very good knowledge

of Russian." (3245-7) Hart could have saved

a lot of time and confusion by reminding you

simple truth that a Russian speaker

was present at every meeting except the

initial contact.

In fact, there never was,

after that initial contact, any problem of

language,

Russian or English.

I concur with

the FBI officer cited in the Committee's

Staff Report, page 37: "There was no question

about being misunderstood."

(3) MI. Hart stated falsely that discrepancies

in the transcripts were "very important in

the history of this case, because (they)

gave rise to charges within the Agency that

Nosenko was not what he purported to be."

(2296-2302)

I know of no lasting misunder-

standings and none at all that

inportantly

affected our juagment of Nosenko's bona fides.

And why would

the transcripts be important

after January 1964,

when Nosenko hinself was

on hard to be questioned?

(4) By introducing the question of discrepancies

in the transcripts Hart misied you in two

other ways:

- He attributed them to my language deficiency

when in fact the transcripts were made by a

native Russian speaker who had participated

in the meetings! How could I know there

were errors in the transcripts?

- He told you that another detector found 150

discrepancies in

the transcripts -- but did

not mention that it was I who brought that

defector into the case,

and caused him to

review the tapes and tanscripts! MI. Hart

falsely hinted that I chose to ignore the

defector's findings.

NW 53080 DooId: 32273600 Page 16

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By way of footnote to this theme, the Committee

might be interested to

learn that

"very thorough,

of high professional integrity and unique expertise

on Soviet intelligence matters, reviewed the whole

Nosenko case and was convinced

that Nosenko was a

sent KGB provocateur and had not held the cositions

in the KGB which he claimed. MI. Hart seems to nave

forgotten to mention this.

3) That the case adainst Nosenko is nothing more than

a paranoid notion: This theme runs clearly through

MI. Hast's testimony.

I have already discussed

certain aspects of it.

Mr. Hart incorrectly attributed the whole

"misunderstanding" to grandiose fantasies of Mr. X.

In discrediting X he mixes,

in the Committee's mind,

a theory about the Sino-soviet split, a "giot" master-

minded "by something called the KG3 disinformation

directorate," and the role in this imaginary plot

of "penetrations at high levals within intelligence

services" of the west,

a plot in the continuing process

of "exaggeration and

elaboration." (2410-27)

one by one in a somewhat calmer frame of

reference, these points may merit the Committee's

attention.

The Disinformation Directorate exists. Every

defector from

the KGB, including Nosenko,

has confined

this, and it has been steadily increased in size and

importance within the KGs over the past decades.

offers a framework for the centralization and exploita-

tion of just such compromised and innocuous information

as Nosenko has provided to western intelligence. It

is active and CIA knows 1t.

so why does

a CIA spokesman

tIy to present it as part of a paranoid fantasy?

Penetration of American Intelligence was suggested

by specific leads given by Me. X, which were deflected by

specific leads given shostly thereafter by

Mr. Nosenko.

MI. Hart is

quite right to say that penetration is part

of the problem.

He gives false testimony if he denies

these leads and says

that we are dealing only with a

theory of with

genera-

allagations.

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MI. Hart implies

that all the doubts about

MI. Nosenko can be dispelled by the factors MI. hart

cited: bad memory, drunkenness, misunderstanding,

bad handling, and

the rest.

In fact, the derense

of MI. Nosenko uses these factors one by one to cover

and explain away

each of hundreds

of specific points

of doubt such as had never arisen in any of the

scores of defections of Soviet Bloc intelligence

officers before Nosenko. I have tried repeatedly

to build a coherent picture of the entirety of Mr.

Nosenko's story, and

the circumstances

surIounding

it, using these

excuses. Not only do they fail to

explain the most important points, but they tend to

contradict each other.

Perhaps ME. Hart's

people

have never gone through this exercise.

Here, in short, is Mr. Hart's message.

whole case against dosenko is a theory aocut a

"so-called plot" and is "sheer nonsansa." (3920-1)

The evidence against Nosenko is "supposed evidence."

The CIa's handlina of Nosenko

This leads to the subject of Nosenko's treatment,

especially his confinement.

For if MI.

Bart succeeds

in dismissing and deriding the case against Nosenko

and all its implications, he sobs

the detantion of

its contest and purpose,

and truly makes it, as MI.

Dodd put it, "outrageous." (3421)

At the risk of repetition I remind you that:

1) There is a carefully documented body o=

evidence, not "supposed evidence",

against

Nosenko,

beyond any explanations

of sad

memory or misunderstandings. It is not

juridical proof,

out it was taken very

serzously oy the Agency's orofessional

leadership, who were neither fools nor

paranoids.

2) Among the implications underlying the very

real possibility that donko was planted on

by the KGB are these two:

a) That Lee Harvey Oswald may have been a

b That

there was KC3 penetration of sensitive

elements of the United States coverament.

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Here are certain facts that Mr. Hart has hidden of

distorted by the manner of his testimony:

1) Nosenko's treatment for the first two months after

his defection was precisely the same as that given

any important defector:

2) During that period Nosenko had ample opportunity

to produce information,

or to act In a manner,

which might reduce or dissolve doubts about him.

3) During this period Nosenko, unlike genuine desectoes,

resisted any serious questioning.

It was not that he

was "drunk around the clock" as MI. Hart put it; he

was usually sober when he deflected questions, changed

the subject, and invented excuses not to talk, even

about isolated points of detail. It became clear that

if he were to be questioned at all, some discipline

had to be applied.

4) Reasons to suspect Nosenko (not paranoid notions)

were

growing and the potential implications to American

security were becoming clearer.

It was our duty to

clarify this matter.

Anything less would have been,

in truth, the sort of dereliction of duty of which

MI. Hart

falsely accuses us

today.

Please bear in mind that I find this case (not its

handling) just as "abominable" as Mi. Hart does.

implications are ugly.

It imposed immense and unpleasant

tasks upon us, and strains upon the

Agency which are all

visible today in your Committee's hearings. The case

served me ill, professionally and

personally. But it

there; it would not go away. The burden tell upon me

I did my duty.

In doing it I was not let down at any time by the

Agency leadership. They understood what

had to be done

and why.

and they took the necessary decisions to nake

t possible.

And so Nosenko was detained.

- If there were reasonable grounds to suspect that he

was a KGB

plant, his detention was l) necessary,

2) effective, and 3) a partial success, for it got

Mosenko's story and his ignorance pure

and unsullied

by outside coaching, and this told

us much aoout what

lay behind.

- If the case against Nosenko was "sheer nonsense,"

then the detention was not justified.

Here is how Mr. Hait described

the decision: "The next

step, since the interrogatións conducted by the CIA, which

as

say were designed not to ascertain information so nuch

as

they

were to pin on Nosenko the laoel of a KGB agent acting

to deceive us, since nothing had been proved in the friendly

confinement, the people running the operation determined that

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This misstates the case. Those early debriefing

sessions

were

not designed to pin any label on Nosenko.

It is true that they did nothing to

assuage ouf

doubts and that during the same period we were learning

things outside which tended rather to reinforce

them.)

If the results had been more promising we might have

worked gradually around,

in the questioning, to the

points of doubt, and might thus have avoided any need

of confinement.

The detention of Nosenko was designed initially

to give us an opportunity to confront him with

certain contradictions in his story. This would

alert him to our suspicions and if he were still

Free he might, we thought, either redefect to the

soviet Union or "go sublic;" either way removing our

chances to get the data we needed to assess the truth

behind his story of Lee harvey oswald and other

serious matters.

Our aim was, as MI. Hart said,

to get a confession:

either of Kes sponsorship, or os white lies which coule,

finally, form some believable pattern.

The results of this and subsequent hostile

interrogations surprised us.

Mosenko was unable to

clarity any

single point of doubt.

Srought up against

his own contradictions and our independent information,

he admitted that there could be no innocent explanation

(not even forgetfulness) of he would remain silent,

he would come up with a new storylies,

only to change

that,

too, later.

He did confess some

but they

tended

to contradict each other,

not offer an innocent

In sac-,

ouI suspicions.

After this series of confrontations, we had an

opportunity, finally,

to do something which would

normally have been done list,

with any cooperative

defector:

conduct a

systenatic debriefing,

which he

had resisted before his

detention.

we could, as Mr.

Hart put it,

"ascertain insormation."

Nosenko

was coogerative.

He even told his questioners

that they were right to have

thus removed him fron

the

temptations of drink and women, and to have forced him

to work seriously.

And so began months

of systematic questioning

under neutral, non-nostile,

circumstances.

Practically

the

full range of his knowladge vas covered. an example

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is the questioning on the subject of Lee Harvey

swald in July, 1964, which the Committee's Star

Report called

"detailed and soeciilc."

report states, "an attempt was made to touch all

aspects."

subject Nosenko was given an

opportunity, as on the Oswald matter, to review

the report

and correct or amplify it.

not drunk, not mistreated, not hallucinating,

there was never the slightest problem of under-

standing. (We should not confuse, as did Mr. Hart's

testimony, the circumstances of one meeting in 1962

language problem, with the whole operation, nos

the conditions of 1962 (alleced drunkenness) witi

the conditions of confinement, nor hostile with

non-nostile questioning.)

Simultaneously we were meticulously checking

illes and Investigating outside,

concerning every

possible aspect of Nosenko's activities and reports.

The results

fill many of those file drawers of

which Mr. Hast spoke.

What we learned suggested, uniformly, that

Nosenko's stories about his career and personal

activities in the KG3 were not true.

To deside

these findings, to dismiss them as

preconceptions,

is to misrepresent facts clear from

the files.

We found that the KGB operations vosenko had

reported, for example,

were already known or had

lost any

value they nad had to the KG3. This is

not true of the reporting of any previous defector.

That Mr. Hart, so eager to convince you of dosenko's

good faith, could cite as evidence only cases which

had been uncovered by an earlier defector, gives you

an idea. Iwo other KGB spies,

an ex-j.S.AImy MCC

and the well-known case of Sergeant Robert Lee

Johnson (the Orly courier-vault penetration,,

of which Nosenko

truly revealed for the

time,

were useless:

the NCo had never had access to

secrets nor truly cooperated, Johnson had lost his

access to the vault and was being publicly exposec

by a neurotic wife.

such was the

pattarn, in addition

to Nosenko's deflection of at least six specific

leads given earlier by the KGB defector %.

Fact piled upon fact, creating a conviction on

the part of every officer

working on this operation

that Nosenko was a KGB

plant.

Each had his own

viewpoint; none was paranoid:

NN 63080 Do01d:32273600

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we conducted two more hostile interrogations,

always increasing our knowledge, never relieving

any suspicions, getting steadily closer to

the

truth, perhaps. But we got no confession.

All of this took time, and nosenko stayed in

confinement.

s to the conditions of his detention,

MI. Hast has given many details.

They do

not seen

directly relevant to the Committee's mission, for

contrary to Mr. Hart's thesis, they did not

materiallv influence Nosenko's reborting one way

or thes

other, nor the question of Nosenko's bona

fides.

They cannot truthfully be adduced to

dismiss the case against Nosenko. On the contray

these details, in Hart's testimony, tended to confuse

the central problem before you: Nosenko's

credibility and what lies behind his message to

America concerning the

• Keg's relations with

Lee Harvey Oswald.

However.

is the detention could be dealt with

as a

separate and distinct topic, I am prepared to

answer any questions I can on the subject.

The original justification for dataining Nosenko

had been that he was in the

United States under

Darole and it was

the agency's duty to prevent his

harmino the security of the united states.

could not last indefinitely. At the end of the

efforts descrioed above, we

were still without

the "prooi" a confession would provide. Ne had

only professional, not juridical, evidence.

Finally our time ran out and a decision had

to be made about what to do about

Nosenko.

The question of "disposal"

Here the extent of CIA's irrätional involvement

with Nosenko becomes blatant.

MI. Hart read (with

relish, according to my friends who watched on IV)

selected items from some penciled jottings in my

handwriting which left with you the inpression that

I had contemolated or considered leven "suggested"

as more

one newspaperman understood him) such

measures as liquidation, drugging, or confinement

in mental institutions.

NW 53080 DooId: 32273600 Page 22

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I state unequivocally, and will do so under oath,

on behalf of myself and anyone I ever knew in or out

of the Central Intelligence Agency, that:

1) No such measures were ever seriously considered.

2) No such measures were ever studied.

(What "loony bin"? How "make him nuts"? What

drugs to induce

forgetfulness?

know of none

now and never did, nor did I ever try to find

out if such exist.

The whole subject of "liqui-

dation" was tabu in the CIA for reasons with

which I wholeneatedly agreed then and still do.)

3) No such measures were ever suggested as a

course of action, even in intimate

personal

conversations.

4) No such measures were ever proposed at any level

•of the Agency.

I do not remember making any such notes.

However,

I can imagine how

'I might have. Responsible as I was

for this "abominable" case, I was called upon to help

the best way to release Nosenko - without a con-

fession but

that he was

an enemy agent.

effort to find something neriting serious consideration,

I suppose that I jotted down, one day, every theoreti-

cally conceivable action.

some of them might have been

mentioned in one form of ancher by others; I doubt they

all sprang from my mind.

(I cannot even guess what

"points one through four" might have been, the ones

Mr. Hart declined

to read because they were "unimportant."

I guess that means they weren't damning to me.).

fact that the notes were penciled reveals that

they were intended to be transient; the fact that

"liquidation" was included reveals that they were

theoretical; and their loose,

undignified language

reveals that they were entirely personal, for my

fleeting use only.

fact, none of these courses

of action could nave been morally acceptable to me,

much less conceivable as a practical suggestion to

higher authority.

MI. Hart admitted, or proudly claimed, that he

himself discovered these notes in

• the files. (4270)

although he recognized their purely sersonal natuse,

that they were not addressed nor intended for any other

person; nor had any practical intent, he chose to bring

them to show-and-tell to the Committee and the American

public. Did he

feel this a moral duty?

Or was it

simply part of his evident intent to deride and destroy

any opposition to Nosenko?

Could he have done it for

HH 53080 DocId:322735aŒOESje0¿з persona] Spite?

Whatever the answer, the

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cost seems too high: he was discrediting his own

Agency for a matter without substance.

I cannot remember any concrete proposal for

"disposal" being made during my tenure.

You under-

stand,

of course, that "disposal" is merely profess-

ional

jargon for

ending a relationship.

The course

the Agency eventually adopted

seems, in retrospect,

che only practical one. I think the adency did well

to rehabilitate Nosenko and, as I thought, put him

out to pasture.

However,

I cannot understand why they then

employed nin

as

an advisor, as

= teacher of their

stais trainees in counterintelligence.

The concrete

suspicions of Nosenko have never been resolved, and

because they are well founded,

they never will

"be

cleared up

and go away."

ME.

Fart and Admiral

Turner may frivolously dismiss them,

as they have

¿one before your committee, but the doubts are

still there and it is irresionsible to expose

clandestine personnel to this individual.

conclusion

MI. Hart's testimony was a curious serformance.

wonders what could drive a government agency into

the position of:

- trying to discredit and bury under a pile

irrelevancies the

reasons to susgect that the

sovier Union sent

to America a provocateur to

mislead us aocut the assassin of President

Kennedy;

- pleading irationally and misleadingly in favor

of a KEB man about whom serious doubts persist;

- misrepresenting, invidiously, its own prior actions;

- denigrating publicly the competence and performance

of duty of its own officers;

- dredging up unsubstantial personal notes,

carelessly in a highly secret file

folder,

falsely suggest

in gublic the planning sy

own people of the vilest forms of misconduct.

As the Congress is conspicuousiy aware, the veil

of secrecy can hide iresponsibility and incompetence.

But behind that veil the cIa used to maintain unusually

high standards of honor and decency and responsibility,

and did a pretty competent joo, often in the face os

impossiole demands.

The decline of these qualities is

HH 53080 DooId:32273600 Page 24

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laid bare by MI. Hart's testimony -- to the Agency's

discredit, to my own dismay, and to the detriment

future recruitment of good men, who will not want to

make

careers in an environment

without integrity.

The Agency need not have gone so far.

After all,

Nosenko's bona fides had been officially certiled.

Those who disagreed were judged at its highest level

to have

"besmirched the Agency's escutcheon." Not

only are they out of the way, but "everything possible"

is being done to see that no

one challenges Nosenko

or his ilk, ever again. (4048) The Agency need only

have said this much, and no more.

That Admiral Turner's personal emissary went

so much suither suggests that une agency may not;

after all, be quite so sure of its position.

Perhaps

that the Committee, wondering about this

defector's strange reporting and unconstained by

CIA's official line, might innocently cry out,

"But the emperor has no clothes on!"

This night

explain the spray of mud, to cloud your view,

The above,

•I repeat, is but a preliminary

statement, and

by no means all I have to say

on these subjects.

you can reach me at the address and phone number

on the clise cade.

I presume, if I am permitted to

appear before your Committee,

that my travel expenses

will be covered by the committee.

Yours truly,

Tennent H. Sagley

N₩ 53080

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chas

11-16-78

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TESTIMONY OF:

TENNENT H. BAGLEY, Former Deputy Chief,

Soviet Bloc Division, Central Intelligence

Agency

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EXECUTIVE SESSION

ASSASSINATION OF JOHN E. KENNEDY

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1978

-

House of Representatives,

Select Committee on

Assassinations,

Subcommittee on Assassination

of John F. Kennedy,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:20 a.m.

in room 2359, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable

Richardson Preyer (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Preyer, Dodd, Fithian, and Thone.

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Mr. Preyer. A quorum being present, the committee will

come to order.

The clerk, Miss Berning, is asked to call the

names of those authorized to sit on this committee.

Ms. Berning. You, Mr. Chairman; Mrs. Burke; Mr. Thone;

Mr. Dodd; and Mr. Fithian will be substituting for Mr. Sawyer.

Mr. Preyer. Thank you.

At this time the Chair will entertain a motion to close

the meeting.

Mr. Dodd. I would so move, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Preyer. You have heard the motion. All those in

favor will answer to the roll call.

Ms. Berning. Mr. Preyer.

Mr. Preyer. Aye.

Ms. Berning. Mr. Thone.

(No response.)

Ms. Berning. Mrs.

Burke.

(No response.)

Ms. Berning. Mr. Dodd.

Mr. Dodd. Aye.

Ms. Berning. Mr. Fithian.

Mr. Fithian. Aye.

Ms. Berning. Three ayes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Preyer. Our witness today is Mr. Tennent H. Bagley.

Mr. Bagley served as the deputy chief of the Soviet Bloc

Division of the CIA in 1962, at the time of Mr. Nosenko's first

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contact with the agency in Geneva, Switzerland, and since that

time, has assisted in further interrogations of Mr. Nosenko.

I understand you have a prepared statement that you

propose to read to the committee and that statement includes a.

letter dated October 11, 1978, to Mr. Blakey, the chief counsel

of the committee::

Is it correct that you would like that

letter to be made a part of the record?

Mr. Bagley. If you would, please.

Mr. Preyer. But you propose to read the first part of your

statement.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Preyer. Without objection, the letter dated October 11,

1978, will be made a part of the record.

(Insert:)

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Mr. Preyer. Mr. Bagley, after you are sworn, you will be

recognized. to read your statement. I might suggest, after you

are sworn, Mr. Bagley, and before you read your statement, that

you might, for the record, give us your present occupation and

your present residence so that we have that basic information.

Will you stand at this time and be sworn.

Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give

this cormittee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing

but the truth, so help you God?

Mr. Bagley. I do.

Mr. Preyer. Thank you, Mr. Bagley. I recognize you at

this time.

TESTIMONY OF TENNENT H. BAGLEY, FORMER DEPUTY •

CHIEF, SOVIET BLOC DIVISION, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

AGENCY

Mr. Bagley. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I

would like to make a few introductory remarks to introduce my-

self as the chairman has requested.

I was born in Annapolis, Maryland, 1925; served in World

War II for 3 years in the United States Marine Corps; attended

Princeton University, University of California, and the

University of Geneva, Switzerland, where I received a doctorate

political

offscience. I served in the CIA from 1950 on and specialized

there in Soviet and satellite operations. I had worked person-

ally at one time or another with most of the important opera-

tions involving these areas

over that generation.

-

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In 1962, I became head of the section responsible for

counterintelligence against the Soviet intelligence services;

and in '65 or '66, I was deputy chief of the Soviet Russia

Division.

When it was amalgamated with the satellite countries, in

'66 -- I believe perhaps '65, I became deputy chief of that

amalgamated division.

In '67 I went to Europe as a station chief in Brussels

where I retired in 1972 on the Agency early retirement program,

entirely, and I repeat entirely, on my own volition. I mention

that because these matters of performance and separation of

service have been raised in this committee.

I also would note for the record that my performance,

which I wouldn't otherwise mention, was consistently rated as

outstanding, and at the end of it I received an agency decora-

tion. Since then I have been a private consultant based in

Brussels where I represent American and European companies who

don't have formal representation in Europe, in the field of

avionics and chemicals, principally.

Now. I proceed to my prepared statement, Mr. Chairman.

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I have come before your committee to reply to the

testimony of Mr. John L. Hart, who represented the Central

Intelligence Agency here on September 15, a testimony which

misled you and misused me.

As the former deputy chief of the Soviet Bloc Division of

CIA and directly responsible for the case of the KGB defector

Yuri Nosenko from 1962 to 1967, I can reply more accurately to

your questions and can bring you a better understanding of this

matter.

For one thing, I won't have to rely as did Mr. Hart on

archeological digs into those 40 file drawers of information.

Mr. Hart's 6-month expedition obviously failed to understand

what they dug up, and their leader was highly selective in what

he chose to exhibit here. For another, I will not disqualify

myself, as he did, from talking about Lee Harvey Oswald, one of

the most important aspects of the Nosenko case, nor about the

case of the earlier defector here called "X," which is a

critical factor in understanding Nosenko.

CIA's selection of Mr. Hart to study the Nosenko case, and

later to present it to you, came to me as a great surprise and

mystery. He seemed to bring few qualifications. to the study of

the most sophisticated Soviet counterintelligence operations of

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our generation. As far as I know he never handled a single

Soviet intelligence officer, and spent his career, as he told

you, remote from Soviet operations, in wars and jungles,

as he

put it. As a result, he was able to tick off 60 years of Soviet

deception as a kind of paranoid fantasy, to make contemptuous

remarks about "historical research about a plot against the

West," and to use the revealing phrase, "I don't happen to be

able to share this type of thing -- "

Mr. Fithian. Mr. Chairman, may I interrupt long enough to

suggest we turn off Di. Bagley's microphone. I think we can

hear him well enough.

Mr. Preyer. The fidelity of that is a little too high.

It

tends to muffle your voice. You may continue.

Mr. Bagley. But "this type of thing" is what the Nosenko

case is all about.

Mr. Hart did not mention, and perhaps never studied, a

number of related cases bearing importantly on the question of

Nosenko's credibility. From his testimony you would never

guess at the existence of cases apart from but related to the

Nosenko case. Mr. Hart apparently did not bother to talk with

many of the best-qualified officers on these cases during his

6 months of research.

When he came to me in 1976 he had not

even read the basic papers of the case and instead of talking

substance he asked about an irrelevant phrase from an 8-year-old

dispatch I had written -- a phrase he later brought up with you,

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the bit about "devastating consequences," in distorted form and

out of context.

His testimony here seems not designed to enlighten your

committee, but to subject Nosenko's critics -- Mr. Hart's former

colleagues -- to vilification and ridicule. He left with the

committee a picture of a small group of irresponsible half-wits,

carried away by wild fantasies about horrendous plots, failing

even to ask questions, neglecting to check on what was said, and

all the time hiding their vile misconduct and illegal thoughts

from a duped leadership.

Mr. Hart told you a lot about Nosenko's mistreatment but

very little about Nosenko's credibility as concerns Lee Harvey

Oswald. He called on you to make an act of faith, as the CIA

seems to have done, in the good will and truth of a Soviet KGB

man who had rendered false and incredible testimony about the

assassin of an American President. I quote: "You should be-

lieve these statements of Mr. Nosenko," Mr. Hart said, "anything

he has said has been said in good faith." Then, avoiding the

subject of Oswald, he led you into a maze of irrelevant detail

about Nosenko's problems and CIA's earlier misunderstanding and

mistreatment of this defector. By spattering mud on Nosenko's

earlier handling, and particularly on me, Mr. Hart threw up a

cloud which threatens to impede your attempts to get at the

answer to the true question before you. And I ask you here to

focus on that question, instead of the irrelevancies.

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That question, of course, is how and why a senior KGB

defector, directly responsible for important aspects of Lee

Harvey Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union, could deliver

testimony to this committee which even the CIA's representative

called "implausible" and "incredible."

Mr. Hart even said that if he were in your position, he

would simply disregard what Mr. Nosenko said about Lee Harvey

Oswald. He seems to have done just that, himself. But Mr.

Helms rightly labeled that a copout, and it is not clear to me

how Mr. Hart thought you could or would just pretend that the

question isn't there.

Of course, you can't. For today you are in the same posi-

tion I was in back in 1964, trying to make sense of Nosenko's

reports. You are investigating and evaluating Nosenko's report-

ing on Lee Harvey Oswald. I did not think, in my time, that I

could just shrug off Nosenko's bizarre story of Oswald with some

irrelevant and half-hearted explanation, as Mr. Hart did here,

and slide off into some other subject.

Mr. Hart did not explain what he thought you should

believe, or how this "incredible" testimony is compatible with

the claim that Nosenko has, by and large, told nothing but the

truth since 1962.

He said Nosenko's testimony to you was a unique aberration;

I quote: "I cannot offhand remember any statements which

(Nosenko) has been proven to have made which were statements

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of real substance other than the contradictions which have been

adduced today on the Lee Harvey Oswald matter, which have been

proven to be incorrect." But the committee only spoke to

Nosenko about this one matter, and even so, the committee de-

tected at least six or seven contradictions from one telling to

another.

Could this, by coincidence, be the only such case?

(I can tell you the answer is no; on the contrary, this was

typical Nosenko whenever he was pinned down on details.)

While extolling Nosenko's truthfulness, Mr. Hart spent a

surprising amount of time giving you reasons why Nosenko might

have lied or seemed to lie, such

as drunken exaggeration, con-

fusion, emotional stresses, hallucinations, and the impact of

mistreatment. But that wasn't helpful to you, for none of

these things had anything to do with Nosenko's story

about

Oswald. After all, Nosenko told the CIA and FBI his story about

Oswald before any mistreatment, and he told it to your committee

after any mistreatment, and no one thought he was drunk at any

one of those times.

So I will go back to the question here and see if I can

help you find an answer. There has to be some way to explain

how this

direct participant in the events delivered incredible

testimony about them. There must be some explanation for the

differences in

Nosenko's story at different times he told it,

for his excuses and evasions when confronted with these differ-

ences, and for his final refusal to talk any more about them

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with your committee.

three things in mind:

As we seek an answer to these questions, I ask you to keep

- First, that at the time he reviewed Oswald's file

for

the KGB, Nosenko was already a willing secret collaborator

of the CIA. Therefore, he must have been alert when

dealing with this matter of such obvious importance to

the United States and to his own country.

- Second, that Nosenko told us of some of these events only

10 weeks after they happened, so there wasn't time for

them to become dim in his memory.

- Third, that no one has suggested that Nosenko is mentally

unfit. Mr. Hart brought in the Wechsler test and other

psychological details merely to show Nosenko's relative

strengths and weaknesses, not to prove him a mental bas-

ket case. On the contrary, Nosenko claims to have risen

fast in the KGB, and he is regarded by his current

employers as "an intelligent human being" who "reasons

well." I am quoting Mr. Hart, of course, who also called

your attention to Nosenko's powers of "logical thought"

and his high score in "power of abstract thinking."

Aside from the irrelevant details about Nosenko's stresses

under mistreatment, and drunkenness, I found two things in Mr.

Hart's testimony which might bear on the Oswald story. First

and foremost, he spoke about compartmentation, bringing his own

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experience to show how a person in any organization working on

the principle of "need to know" might not be aware of everything

going on, even in his own operations. Now, I suppose Mr. Hart

intended this as a contribution to Mr. Nosenko's defense;

certainly Mr. Nosenko had never mentioned it. The trouble is,

it doesn't apply to this story. Nosenko had said repeatedly,

to

CIA and FBI and recently swore under oath to this committee,

that he was right there on the inside of any "compartment."

He

personally reviewed the application of Oswald to stay in the

USSR in 1959 and he personally participated in the recommenda-

tion that the KGB should not let Oswald stay in the country and

in the decision not to notify the KGB sections which might

normally be interested in debriefing a man like Oswald. Nosenko

knew that the KGB leadership decided that they "didn't want to

be involved" with Oswald -- not to question him at all, not even

to screen him as a possible enemy plant. Nosenko personally

participated in the refusal of Oswald's visa request from

Mexico not long before the assassination of President Kennedy.

And after the assassination, Nosenko himself was told to review

Oswald's. KGB file; and did so. He has insisted that if anyone

in the KGB ever talked to Oswald, he, Nosenko, would know about

it. So "compartmentation" explains nothing. Nosenko's story

rests essentially on his personal involvement and authority.

The second and last possible explanation which we can find

in Mr. Hart's testimony is Nosenko's odd memory, which Mr. Hart

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took such pains to establish. After all, Nosenko seems to have

changed details of seven of eight aspects of the story at one

time or another. The trouble with this is, it doesn't touch the

heart of the story, the truly incredible part, Nosenko didn't

forget whether or not the KGB questioned Oswald; he remembers

sharply and consistently -- and insists, whatever other changes

he makes in his story -- that Oswald was never questioned by the

KGB. He knows that and remembers it, for he participated

directly in the decision not to.

Now that was all Mr. Hart offered. But I think we should

try every conceivable explanation. Here are a couple I can

think of.

Maybe Nosenko was merely boasting, exaggerating, building

things up a bit, especially his personal role. Maybe, for

example, he only overheard some KGB officers talking, didn't

hear it right, and then passed on an incorrect story to us as

his experience, to make himself look important in our eyes.

Maybe, under this interpretation, he honestly thinks his story

is true.

Another explanation, going a bit further, might be that he

invented the whole story. Perhaps, convinced that the USSR

wouldn't get involved in the assassination of an American

President (which is what we all tend to think), he invented

this story as a contribution to American peace of mind and to

international amity.

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Both of these explanations run into trouble. Nosenko,

while in detention, had plenty of time and incentive to back off

a mere exaggeration, and did, in fact, admit a few minor lies.

But about this story he is adamant. Just recently Mr. Hart

tried to get Nosenko tô come off it, but even in the current

climate of good will and trust, Nosenko refused. And remember,

too, that Nosenko volunteered to testify to his incredible tale

before the Warren Commission, and he swore to it under oath be-

fore your committee.

And there are other problems, too. If we begin to play

with the idea of fabrication we will have to ask just what parts

of the story were invented: did Nosenko also invent the high

KGB job which gave him "knowledge" of the Oswald case?

Anyway, CIA wouldn't accept this line of speculation.

They

insist that Nosenko always talks in good faith, even if his

Oswald story isn't believable. They surely wouldn't want you

to think they had hired a fabricator as their advisor and

teacher.

And there is yet another obstacle to this line of thought,

and not the least important. We must not forget that the

Soviet Government itself has confirmed Nosenko's authority to

tell the whole story about Oswaid. In Mr. Edward Jay Epstein's

book Legend he reports that an attache of the Soviet embassy in

Washington, named Agu, told him that Nosenko is the person who

knows most about Oswald in Russia, even more than the people in

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Minsk whom Epstein applied vainly to go see.

No, I think we can all agree: Mr. Hart, myself, your

committee, Mr. Agu, and Mr. Nosenko: Nosenko was neither ex-

aggerating nor inventing nor forgetting nor was he compartmented

away from the essential facts of the story.

So what is left to explain this incredible testimony? I

can think of only two explanations.

Maybe Nosenko's story is true, after all. Let's overlook

for a moment the fact that everyone (except Mr. Nosenko) believes

the contrary, including Mr. Hart and today's CIA, including Mr.

Helms, Soviet specialists, and ex-KGB veterans in the West.

Let's also overlook the way Nosenko contradicted himself on

points of detail from one telling to another. Let's focus only

on the essential elements of the story, the ones which remain

constant. There are two: first, that the KGB never questioned

Oswald, and second, that the KGB never found out that Oswald

had information to offer them about interesting U.S. military

matters.

Here was this young American, Lee Harvey Oswald, just out

of the Marine Corps, already inside the USSR and going to great

lengths to stay there and become a citizen. The KGB never

bothered to talk to him, not even once, not even to get an idea

whether he might be a CIA plant. (and although even Nosenko once

said, I think, that the KGB feared he might be).

Can this be true?: Could we all be wrong in what we've

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heard about rigid Soviet security precautions and about their

strict procedures and disciplines, and about how dangerous it is

in the USSR for someone to take a risky decision (like failing

to screen an applicant for permanent residence in the USSR)?

Of course not. Let me give you one small case history

which illustrates just how wrong Nosenko's story is. This is an

actual event which shows how the real KGB, in the real USSR,

reacts to situations like this. It was told by a former KGB

man named Kaarlo Tuomi, and can be found on page 286 of John

Barron's book, KGB. The story concerns (and from here on I

•quote) "a young Finnish couple who illegally crossed the Soviet

border in 1953. The couple walked into a militia station and

requested Soviet citizenship, but the KGB jailed them. Continu-

Ous

questioning during the next 11 months indicated only that

the couple believed communist propaganda and sincerely sought to

enjoy the life it promised. Nevertheless the KGB consigned

them to an exile camp for suspects in Kirov province. Because

Tuomi spoke Finnish, the KGB sent him into the camp as a

"prisoner" with instructions to become friends with the couple.

Hardened as he was to privation, he was still aghast at what he

saw in the camp. Whole families subsisted in five-by-eight

wooden stalls or cells in communal barracks. Each morning at

six, trucks hauled all the men away to peat bogs where they

labored until dark. Small children, Tuomi observed, regularly

died of ordinary maladies because of inadequate medical care.

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Worse still, the camp inmates, who had committed no crime, had

no idea when, if ever, they might be released. After only 3

days Tuomi persuaded himself that the forlorn Finns were con-

cealing nothing, and he signaled the camp administrator to

remove him.

'That place is just hell,' he later told Serafim,

his KGB supervisor. 'Those people are living like slaves.' 'I

understand, ' Serafim said, 'but don't get so excited. There's

nothing you or I can do about it.'" That's the end of the

quotation.

So on the one hand we have a young ex-Marine, Lee Harvey

Oswald, from the United States; on the other hand we have a

simple Finnish family. Both say they want to live in Russia.

The Finns are questioned for 1l months by the KGB, then con-

signed indefinitely to a hellish camp for suspects. The Ameri-

can is not even talked to once by the KGB. The Finn's experi-

ence fits all we know about the true Soviet Union, from

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and so many others, unanimously.

Oswald's experience, as Nosenko tells it, cannot have happened.

The second main point of Nosenko's story about Oswald was

that the KGB did not find out that Oswald had information to

offer about interesting military matters. Nosenko specifically

told your committee this. To demonstrate its falsity, I need

only quote from page 262 of the Warren Commission report,

concerning Oswald's interview with the American Consul Snyder in

Moscow on October 31, 1959, when Oswald declared that he wished

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to renounce his U.S. citizenship. I quote: "Oswald also

informed Snyder that he had been a radar operator in the Marine

Corps, intimating that he might know of something of special

interest, and that he had informed a Soviet official that he

would give the Soviets any information concerning the Marine

Corps and radar operation which he possessed."

Nosenko didn't mention this. Apparently he didn't know it.

So I think we can safely agree with Mr. Hart that Nosenko's

story about Oswald is not credible, not true.

Up to this point we've tried five explanations and still

haven't found any acceptable one for Nosenko's story, its

contradictions, or his evasive manner when confronted with these

contradictions. But because you have to find an explanation,

just as I had to in 1964, I will propose here the only other

explanation I can think of -- one which might explain all the

facts before us, including Nosenko's performance before this

committee.

This sixth explanation is, of course, that Nosenko's

story, in its essence, is

a message from the Soviet leadership,

carried to the United States by a KGB-controlled agent provoca-

teur who had already established a clandestine relationship of

trust with CIA for other purposes a year earlier. The core of

the Soviet message is simple: that the KGB, or Soviet Intelli-

gence, had nothing to do with President Kennedy's assassin,

nothing at all.

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Why they might have sent such a crude message, why they

selected this channel to send it, and what truth may lie behind

the story given to us, can only be guessed at. If you like, I

am prepared to go into such speculation.

But even without the

answers to these questions, this sixth explanation would make it

clear why Nosenko adhered so rigidly to his story. However

incredible we might find a message from the Soviet leadership,

learned and recited by Nosenko, we would find it difficult to

get him to back off it: discipline is discipline, especially

in the KGB.

Now, I'm ready to believe that Nosenko may have genuinely

forgotten some details of this learned story. I can also

accept that, on his own, he may have embroidered on it and got

caught when he forgot his own embroidery; this seems

• to fit the

facts we have, including Mr. Hart's description of Mr. Nosenko's

memory. This could explain Nosenko's differing descriptions

of

the KGB file, and his accounts of whether there was or wasn't

careful surveillance of Oswald which would detect his relations

with Marina, and his change of name of the KGB officer who

worked with him on the Oswald case -- that sort of detail. It

would also explain why he told your committee repeatedly that he

didn't remember what he'd said previously. This wouldn't have

mattered if he'd really lived through the experiences he

described; his stories of them at different times should come

out straight, all by themselves. When, in fact, they didn't,

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Nosenko resorted to this strange statement, which made his

stary appear more memorized than experienced.

Now, I recognize that this is an unpleasant and troubling

supposition, a hot potato indeed. But please remember that

before coming to it, we had dismissed all the other explanations

possible.

So we cannot simply slide over this as easily as CIA

does. It is a serious possibility, not a sick fantasy.. In fact,

it is hard to avoid.

What is more, Nosenko's story of Oswald is only one of

scores of things that Nosenko said which make him appear to be a

KGB plant. If the Oswald story were alone, as Mr. Hart said it

was, a

strange aberration in an otherwise normal performance,

perhaps one could just shrug and forget it. It is not. We got

the

same evasions, contradictions, excuses, whenever we pinned

Nosenko down, the way you did on the Oswald story. Those other

matters, while not of direct concern to this committee, included

Nosenko's accounts. of his career, of his travels, of the way he

learned the various items of information he reported, and even

accounts of his private life. More important, there were things

outside his own reporting and his own performance, which could

not be explained away by any part of CIA's litany of excuses for

Nosenko (which so strangely resemble Nosenko's own). All of

those irregularities point to the same conclusion: that Nosenko

was sent by the KGB to deceive us. That is, they point to the

same conclusion as our sixth possible explanation of Nosenko's

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story about Oswald.

The CIA's manner of dealing with these points of doubt

about Nosenko's good faith (at least since 1967) has been to

take them one by one, each out of context of the others, and

dismiss them with a variety of excuses, or rationalizations:

confusion, drunkenness, language problems, denial that he ever:

said it, bad memory, exaggeration, boasting, and coincidence --

hundreds and hundreds of coincidences. With any other defector,

a small fraction of this number of things would have caused and

perpetuated the gravest doubts. For the KGB does send false

defectors to the West, and has been doing so for 60 years. And

the doubts about this one defector were persuasive to the CIA

leadership of an earlier time.

Today, a later CIA leadership chooses to dismiss them. If

they only pretended to do so, to justify the release and re-

habilitation of Nosenko, that would be understandable. But they

must really believe in Nosenko, for they are using him in cur-

rent counterintelligence work and exposing their clandestine

officers to him, and bringing him into their secret premises

to

help train their counterintelligence personnel.

They go much further to demonstrate the depth of their

commitment to Nosenko.. They vilify their earlier colleagues

• who

disapproved of him. The intensity of Mr. Hart's attack on

me,

and the fact that it was done in public, must have surprised

you, as it did others with whom I've spoken over the past weeks.

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As Nosenko's principal opponent, I am made out in public as a

miserable incompetent and given credit, falsely, for murderous

thoughts, illegal designs, torture, and malfeasance.

The CIA had to go far out to invent these charges, which

are not true. Mr. Hart had to bend some facts, invent others,

and gloss over a lot more, in order to cover me with mud.

In fact, I have detected no less than 30 errors in his

testimony, 20 other misleading statements, and 10 major omis-

sions. They seem aimed to destroy the opposition to Nosenko,

and they have the effect of misleading your committee on the

significance of Nosenko's testimony about Oswald.

I will cite only a few of these points here. Others are to

be found in my letter to this committee dated October 11, 1978,

which I introduce as an annex to my testimony. I can, of course,

go into further detail if you wish. But I discuss below some of

the points most relevant to your appraisal of Mr. Nosenko's

credibility as concerns Lee Harvey Oswald.

First, Mr. Hart misled you badly on the question of

Nosenko's general credibility. It was stunning to hear him say,

after reviewing every detail of the case for 6 months with the

aid of four assistants, (I quote) "I see no reason" -- here I

repeat, "I see no reason" -- "to think that (Nosenko) has

ever

told an untruth, except because he didn't remember it or didn't

know or during those times when he was under the influence of

alcohol he exaggerated." Even 10 years away from this case, I

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can remember at least 20 clear cases of Nosenko's untruths about

KGB activity and about the career which gave him authority to

tell of it, and a dozen examples of his ignorance of matters

within his claimed area of responsibility, for which there is no

innocent explanation.

Excuse me just a moment and off the record.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. Preyer. Back on the record.

Mr. Bagley. The "influence of alcohol" cannot be much of

a factor, for as Mr. Hart reminds, us, Nosenko was questioned for

292 days while in detention -- when he had no alcohol at all.

But Mr. Hart jumbled together the conditions of the 1962 meetings

(alleged drunkenness) with those of confinement, leading

Congressman Dodd to lay importance on Nosenko's drinking. He

even got over to Mr. Dodd, by a subtle turn of phrase, the idea

that hallucinations "probably" influenced Nosenko's performance

under interrogation. Yet Mr. Hart must have known that

hallucinations were never a factor in the question-and-answer

sessions.

Then, too, Mr. Hart misstated the early roots of our

suspicions of Nosenko. Mr. Hart said that they arose from the

paranoid imaginings and jealousy of a previous defector, whom he

calls "X." Mr. Hart told you, and I quote, that "Mr. Y's views

were immediately taken to be the definitive views of Nosenko and

from that point on, the treatment of Mr. Nosenko was never,

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until 1967, devoted to learning what Mr. Nosenko said." This is

not true, as a document in the files, which I wrote in 1962,

will make clear. It was not"X"'s theories which caused my

initial suspicion of Nosenko in 1962. It was the overlap of

Nosenko's reports -- at first glance entirely convincing and

important -- with those given 6 months earlier by "X." Alone,

Nosenko looked good to me, as Mr. Hart said; seen alongside "X,"

whose reporting I had not seen before coming to Headquarters

after the 1962 meetings with Nosenko, Nosenko looked very odd

indeed. The matters which overlapped were serious ones,

including a specific lead to penetration of CIA -- not a general

allegation, as Mr. Hart misleadingly suggested. There were at

least a dozen such points of overlap, of which I can still

remember at least eight. Nosenko's information tended to negate

or deflect leads from "X."

And this brings me to Mr. Hart's efforts to make you think

that the suspicions of Nosenko were based on foolish fancies

about "horrendous plots." Let me try to restore the balance

here. A KGB paper of this period described the need for dis-

information (deception) in KGB counterintelligence work. It

stated that just catching American spies isn't enough, for the

enemy can always start again with new ones. Therefore, said

this KGB document, disinformation operations are essential. And

among their purposes was "to negate and discredit authentic in-

formation which the enemy has obtained." There is some reason

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to believe that Nosenko was on just such a mission in 1962:

to

cover and protect KGB sources threatened by "X"'s defection.

Does this sound like a "horrendous plot" conjured up by

paranoids? It is known counterespionage technique, perfectly

understandable to laymen. But as I have said, Mr. Hart's

purpose was not enlightenment, but ridicule.

To prove Mr. Nosenko's credibility, Mr. Hart made a

breathtaking misstatement about the defector "X": "Quantita-

tively and qualitatively," said Mr. Hart, "the information given

by Mr. 'X' was much smaller than that given by Nosenko." Could

Mr. Hart really have meant that?

Mr. "X," paranoid or not,

provided in the first months after his defection information

which led to the final uncovering of Kim Philby; to the first

detection of several important penetrations of Western European

governments; proof (not general allegations) of penetration at

the heart of French intelligence; and pointers to serious

penetrations of the United States Government. Before Nosenko

"X" uncovered the current organization and methods of the KGB,

and very large numbers of its personnel active in its foreign

operations.

And listen to this: It was Mr. "X" who first revealed both

of the two KGB operations which Mr. Hart adduced as of Nosenko's

good faith!. They concerned microphones in the American Embassy

in Moscow and a penetration of one of our NATO allies..

As for the microphones, Mr. Hart stated that "Mr. Nosenko

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was responsible for the discovery of

a system of microphones

within the U.S. Embassy in Moscow which had hitherto been

suspected but nobody had enough information on it to actually

detect it." But Mr. "X" had given approximate locations of some

of the microphones 6 months earlier. Like Nosenko, he did not

know the precise locations, but he knew the mikes were there and

could indicate some specific offices where they could be found.

The actual tearing out of walls, which Mr. Hart mentioned, would

have been done, and the microphone "system" found, without

Nosenko's information. Contrary to Mr. Hart's statement the KGB

would "throw away" already-compromised information to build up

source of theirs. Mr. Hart simply hid from you the fact that

this information was already compromised when Nosenko delivered

it.

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Mr. Hart's other proof of Nosenko's credibility was as

follows: Mr. Hart said, "A very high level KGB penetration in

very sensitive position in a Western European government was,

the basis of Mr. Nosenko's lead, arrested, tried, and convicted

of espionage. There is no reason to believe that the Soviets

would have given this information away." End of quote. Now,

Mr. Hart was presumably referring to a man we can here call "y"

although his case is very well known to the public. Did Mr.

Hart really not know, or did he choose to hide from you, the

fact that "y"'s reports to the KGB were known to Mr. "X," the

earlier defector? The KGB, knowing this, cut off contact with

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"Y" immediately after "X"'s defection. "y"'s uncovering was

therefore inevitable, even though "X" had not known "y"'s name.

Nosenko added one item of information which permitted "y" to be

caught sooner; that is all. How, then, could Mr. Hart have said

"There is no reason to believe that the Soviets would have given

this information away"? The reason, that "y" was already

compromised, was perfectly clear in the files which Mr. Hart's

team studied.

Mr. Hart also told you that Mr. "X" had confirmed Nosenko's

•claimed positions in the KGB. This is not true. Mr. "X" said,

on the contrary, that he had personally visited the American

Embassy section of the KGB during the 1960-61 period when

Nosenko claims to have been its deputy chief, and knew definite-

ly that Nosenko was not serving there.

So these are some of

the matters affecting Nosenko's

general credibility, which may be important to you when you

assess the meaning of Nosenko's incredible testimony on Oswald.

Now, Mr. Hart also distorted the CIA's performance in get-

ting the facts about Oswald from Nosenko. Your committee staff

report had it right, before Mr. Hart came forth. Referring to

the Agency's questioning of Nosenko on July 3 and 27, 1964, the

report says that the CIA's questions "were detailed and specific

about Nosenko's knowledge of Oswald. The questions were

chronological and an attempt was made to touch all aspects of

Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union." Close quote. Moreover, the

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CIA gave Nosenko a transcript of his own remarks so he could add

any more he knew, or correct any errors. This is from your staff

report, pages 7-9.

But then came Mr. Hart with his sweeping denunciations of

CIA's "miserable" and "dismal" and "zero" performance, and

stating flatly that "There was no effort being made to get at

more information (Nosenko) might have." Mr. Hart thus led

Congressman Fithian to suggest that the CIA had not even taken

"the logical first step" of getting Nosenko's information and

led the chairman to conclude that no investigation of Oswald's

activities as known to Nosenko had been made. In this Mr. Hart

concurred.

In truth, of course, there was nothing more to be got from

Nosenko, unless it would be later changes of earlier details, as

happened when your committee questioned Nosenko. If there had

been more, we would have gone doggedly after it, of course.

We

were not the incompetents Mr. Hart made us out to be. Your

staff report said that Nosenko "recited" the same story in each

of his three sessions with the committee. The word is apt:

Nosenko had "recited" that story before, to the CIA and FBI,

each of which questioned him systematically about it. So why

did Mr. Hart give his own Agency a "zero" on all phases of the

handling of Nosenko? Surely he was seeking to fling mud, not to

give serious answers to serious questions. His effect was

confusion.

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Mr. Hart also suggested to you that CIA just didn't in-

vestigate the validity of what Nosenko had said about Oswald.

That is equally false. What else, for example, was the purpose

of our subjecting Nosenko to hostile interrogation and subject-

ing his information to meticulous investigation wherever we

could? Those 40 file drawers are full of the results.

But of course we were not able to check inside the USSR, as

the Warren Commission noted. We didn't have other sources in

the KGB who were connected with this Oswald case. But think how

lucky we were to have even one inside source on Oswald inside

the KGB. Of the many thousands of KGB men around the world, CIA

had secret relations with only one, and this one turned out to

have participated directly in the Oswald case. Not only once,

but on three separate occasions: when Oswald came to Russia in

1959; when he

applied for a visa from Mexico to return to

Russia; and again after the assassination when the Kremlin

leadership caused a definitive review of the whole KGB file on

Oswald. How many KGB men could say as much? CIA was thus un-

believably lucky to be able to contribute to the Warren Report.

In view of other suspicions of Nosenko, the key word in that

last sentence is "unbelievably."

Gentlemen, I hesitated before replying publicly to Mr.

Hart's false charges, for a number of reasons:

- For one thing, I found it hard to imagine myself in

the position of defending myself against the CIA before

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the Congress. My record should have been ample

protection against that.

- Then, too, I'm comfortable in the knowledge that my.

honor and integrity, although torn to shreds by the

CIA before this committee and the public, remain

intact with those who know the truth.

- And of course, my embarrassment, my public dishonor,

count for little compared with the reputation of a

Government agency which must uphold an image of

integrity. To call public attention to the way the

CIA misinformed you might cause it embarrassment. I

do not want to harm the CIA, which has enough real

enemies.

For without the CIA, who would remain to oppose the relent-

less work of

subversion and deception and penetration being

directed abroad by the KGB against our country? Who would

oppose that arrogant and brutal instrument of repression in the

secret, dark places where it works?

Finally, it was this thought, of the KGB, which decided me

to come before you. Some of the mud the CIA spattered on me

might have clouded your view of the KGB's relations

with Lee

Harvey Oswald, as given to you by Yuri Nosenko of the KGB. The

flying mud may have screened important aspects of the case. By

wiping some of it away I thought I might help you to restore

what seemed to me a clear presentation of the facts in your

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committee staff report -- written before Mr. Hart's testimony.

What I seek is to let the facts carry the day, to wipe

them clean again for your inspection. You need not accept

either the beseechings of Mr. Hart, or any counterargument from

me .

But my hope is that you will not let the facts get obscured

by emotional distortions, or irrelevancies.

Mr. Chairman, my prepared statement continues now with a

series of remarks on a series of issues of interest to the

committee, which is the detention of Mr. Nosenko. I have already

mentioned to you that I think it irrelevant to your concerns,

but since it was a matter of considerable concern to you and of

interest to the public, I have prepared a few pages here which

I can either read or use in response to a few questions you may

have.

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Mr. Preyer. Let me suggest that you read them.

Mr. Bagley. Thank you, sir.

The detention of Nosenko has

been described in sensation-

alist terms by Mr. Hart and, as he clearly intended, has caused

some outrage on the part of the committee. I want to deal with

it because the committee has been led to consider it, not be-

cause it is truly pertinent to your concerns. Mr. Hart and Mr.

Nosenko use it, falsely, as an excuse for discrepancies in

Nosenko's reporting. But this is a distraction, filling Mr.

Hart's testimony in place of discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mir. Hart's bias must have been evident to all. He

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expressed his personal view that the treatment of Nosenko was

"absolutely unacceptable" and he introduced terms like "bank

vault" to imply inhuman treatment. He led Mr. Sawyer to talk of

a "torture vault" and "partial starvation" and gave the idea

that Nosenko was subjected to unbearable heat, or left shuddering

in the wintry cold. He portrayed the conditions in terms

leading committee members to use words like "shocking" and

"horrible." Yet at the same time Mr. Hart was describing

himself as a "historian" bound by known fact. In fact, he mis-

led you about almost every aspect of the detention.

Had he in fact bothered to collect facts from all con-

cerned, you would have gotten a quite different and more

rational point of view, one which deserved at least some respect

if for no other reasons than that it prevailed within Mr. Hart's

own organization for 3 years.

In fact, one overriding flaw in Mr. Hart's version of these

"horrible" matters is that the Agency leadership -- serious and

responsible people -- had approved Nosenko's detention and at

least the broad outlines of his treatment. Mr. Hart's way

around this was

to suggest that Mr. Helms was not aware of what

was going on. Mr. Helms has belied that and indeed has called

into question some of the impressions conveyed by Mr. Hart

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the committee concerning Nosenko's treatment.

I participated in most of the discussions about the

detention and I remember the circumstances pretty well. Let me

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propose to you the explanation I would have given you had I

been the Agency's representative. What I knew may be more valid

then what Mr. Hart has

selected from Agency records and colored

in sensationalist hues.

In the first place, let me remind you of the reasons for

the detention. Mr. Helms described a few of them, but Mr. Hart

did not give you the picture at all. This is important, for if

Mr. Hart succeeds in dismissing and deriding the case against

Nosenko and all its implications, he robs the detention of its

context and purpose and truly makes it, as Mr. Dodd put it,

"outrageous." Here is why Nosenko was confined:

- First, during the initial period of freedom after his

defection, when his handling was identical to that of any normal

defector, Nosenko resisted any serious questioning. It was not

that he was "drunk around the clock" as Mr. Hart put it; he was

usually sober when he deflected questions, changed the subject,

and invented excuses not to talk.

- Second, his conduct and lack of discipline threatened

embarrassment to the Agency during his parole in the United

States.

Remember, he had not been formally admitted to this

country.

- Third, there was a documented body of evidence, not

"supposed evidence" -- that's a quote from Mr. Hart -- beyond

any explanations of bad memory or misunderstandings, which made

it likely that Nosenko had been sent by the KGB to mislead us.

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It was not juridicial proof, but it was taken very seriously by

the Agency's professional leadership, who were neither fools nor

paranoids.

- Fourth, the implications underlying this very real

possibility were too serious to ignore. Among them were these

two: that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been a KGB agent, and that

there was KGB penetration of sensitive elements of the United

States Government.

- Fifth, if we were to confront Nosenko with the contra-

dictions and doubts while he was still free, he would be able to

take steps to evade further questioning indefinitely.

- Sixth, there was a special urgency to get at the truth of

Nosenko's reports about. Lee Harvey Oswald because of the time

limits imposed on the Warren Commission.

The legal basis for the detention has been explained to you

by Mr. Helms. It had, as we understood clearly at the time, the

approval of the Department of Justice and other Government

agencies. We did not think we were doing anything illegal, at

least not until the time had stretched out beyond reasonable

limits, at which time we began to prepare for his release.

Nosenko himself didn't seem to consider it "illegal" at the

time; it doubtless seemed a logical intensification of the

severity of the screening process which he knew he had to go

through. He did not complain of violation of any constitutional

rights nor ask for a lawyer.. An innocent man might have

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protested and resisted, but Nosenko was engaged in a contest,

and knew that he was failing to convince us -- as indeed he

freely admitted (he said he was "looking bad" even to himself,

but had no way to explain the many contradictions, ignorances,

and errors). He complained about cold and heat, but not, as far

as I remember, about the fact of detention and interrogation.

There were two basic requirements for the detention: that

it be secure and that Nosenko not be able to communicate with

the outside (with the KGB or with unwitting helpers). There-

fore, we needed a separate, isolated house in a rural or thinly

populated area, as far as possible from other houses, with

discreet access for the comings and goings which an interroga-

tion would require. The Office of Security found a place, but

as I remember it was not easy and the rent was high.

The actual conditions of detention within the house were

not designed to cause him discomfort -- or, for that matter,

comfort either. They were to be healthy and clean. He was

never touched or threatened and he always knew he wouldn't be;

he could always resist a line of questioning by simply clamming

up, with a shrug; there was nothing we could do about it.

Nosenko complained about the heat in summer.. His window

was blocked, not to cause him discomfort but to avoid contact

with the outside. A top-floor room was chosen in preference to

a basement because

it would be dry and healthy, while the base-

ment would be damp. When it became stuffy, Nosenko rightly

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complained and as I remember, an effort was made to improve the

situation; I think a blower was installed to keep the air

moving, but perhaps this can be checked in the files.

I don't remember any complaint about cold in the winter.

If there had been, I cannot imagine why he would not have been

given extra blankets, and I do not believe the complaint is

justified.

His diet was planned always in consultation with a medical

doctor.

To accuse the Agency of trying to subject him to

"partial starvation" is unjust; to imply that Nosenko's

handlers wanted to, but a medical doctor "intervened" (as Mr.

Hart said) is to distort the facts. The doctor was

consulted

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advance, at every phase of the detention, and checked Nosenko

regularly. I can't remember the time period, but I think it was

weekly. It might have been every 2 weeks. The diet was made

more or less austere depending on the situation at any given

phase of the interrogation, but it was always a healthy one..

The time frame has been much distorted here. We did not

foresee a long detention -- as both Mr. Helms and Mr. Hart have

said. The first step, and perhaps the only one which required

detention, was to be the confrontation, the hostile interroga-

tion. I do not remember how long we thought it would last;

perhaps somewhere between 2 weeks and 2 months. From then on

the detention became extended, phase by phase.

First, the hostile interrogation. The results surprised

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us.

Before, we suspected Nosenko might be a plant; afterwards,

we had come to think moreover that he might never have been a

true KGB officer and that he surely had not held certain of the

positions in the KGB which he claimed. (This view was rein-.

forced in later questionings.)

At the conclusion of the hostile interrogation, in which

Nosenko himself admitted that he: "looked bad" even to himself,

Nosenko was entirely willing to submit to a systematic de-

briefing. He said that we had been right to separate him from

drink and women and make him work seriöusly. He did not com-

plain then of the conditions of detention.

So began the second phase, a systematic questioning of the

sort which we would have done with any normal defector under

conditions of freedom. Nosenko ate quite good food, got books

to read, and cooperated without complaint (except when it got

too hot) .

The third phase was a second hostile interrogation using

the new information derived from his questioning and from out-

side investigations in the meantime. It deepened our suspicions,

gave us more insight into what might lie behind him, and

produced some confessions of minor lies -- which did not remove

the doubts, for the new version contradicted other things he

had said. But he did not confess to Soviet control. During

this period his diet was made more Spartan, and he was not given

reading material.

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Nothing was harmful to Nosenko, however. You have only to

listen to his complaints (lack of reading material, and other

diversions, being about the worse) to realize that this was not

"torture" whatever Nosenko's advantage in making it appear so.

After the second hostile interrogation -- I don't remember

the date; I believe it was late 1965 -- excuse me, late 1964 --

Nosenko was

moved to the second holding area. This we can call

the fourth phase.

Much has been made of CIA's constructing a house to hold

Nosenko. But the true explanation is far less lurid than Mr.

Hart would make it seem. A new safehouse was needed because

time erodes the security of any safe area; it was time to move.

There was no thought about how much longer the detention had to

last; Nosenko was still in the United States on parole to the

CIA; we would not, under any circumstances, have certified to

the immigration authorities that we considered him a bona fide

immigrant. On the contrary, we had a mass of reasons to believe

that he was a KGB agent sent to harm the interests of this

country.

So what could we do about him? The first thing, in

view of the serious implications underlying this suspicion, was

to clarify the doubts to the best of our ability. And at that

point we still thought there were ways to learn more, enough to

justify continuing the effort.

Suitable rural houses near Washington were, of course, hard

to find, expensive to rent, and involved leases for minimum

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period, security hazards, and the threat that breaches of

security might make us move again and again. And such holding

areas required a large guard force.

So the Office of Security considered it not only safer and

better for our purposes, but also cheaper, to build a place on

Government-owned land, than to lease a new house, pay the

guards, make the alterations, et cetera, for a period we could

not control.

As to

the design of that house. Mr. Hart invented the term

"bank vault"' which is a catchy phrase but a purposeful misrep-

resentation, a misrepresentation of his own Agency's motives.

The facts were these. The house was to be separate, but to hold

down costs it should be as small as possible. There were

certain minimum requirements: an interview room, a room for

Nosenko, and a room for the guard or guards. It should require

as few guards as possible. It should have an open-air exercise

area, but not such as

to let him see where he was. And as in

the earlier safehouse, he should not be able to communicate with

the outside, hence no windows. To prevent tunneling, his room

should be of stronger construction.. Now, to go from these last

two criteria, as Mr. Hart did, and say that "in addition to the

vault, which surrounded it," is to misstate the truth.

The house was designed by the Office of Security, which was

responsible for all the physical aspects of holding Nosenko.

At

no

time did any representative of the Office of Security express

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any dissatisfaction with the manner of Nosenko's handling, nor

disagreement with the suspicions of Nosenko which underlay the

detention.

It has been said that Nosenko was kept in "solitary con-

finement" and unoccupied, with a

special view to influencing

him to confess. In fact, there was no alternative to "solitary

confinement" (could we have found him a companion) and it was

physically impossible to arrange to question him constantly.

One day of interrogation requires at least a day and perhaps

more of report writing, and a day or more of investigation, and

later sessions take time to prepare. And for almost all the

people involved, there were other responsibilities, other tasks;

the work went on even outside the Nosenko case. How Mr. Hart

could imagine that the Agency leadership (professionals with

experience in interrogation) thought Nosenko was under constant

questioning is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Hart says we inter-

rogated Nosenko for 292 days out of 1277. That makes about 1

day in 4, if you let us off for weekends, and that sounds

about

right and normal. If I once wrote that the time between

questionings would make Nosenko "ponder," then I was rational-

izing inevitable gaps, not planning an unbearable isolation for

the man.

The detention had positive results. We got, as we never

could have otherwise, the bulk of what Nosenko had to report,

pure and free of any outside coaching. We were able to detect

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just how ignorant he was, and in just what areas. We could

probe the limits of his knowledge, and they were rigid, even in

connection with things he had claimed to have lived through.

(Much like his recited story of Lee Harvey Oswald). We were

able to apply test questions to refine or test our hypotheses,

in the absence of a confession. But, limited by morality and

the law, we were not able to get a confession. In retrospect,

with the benefit of hindsight, I suppose that we would have done

just as well to give him better food, more books, music, a big

bed, games, and occasional informal conversations. But that was

not clear at the time.

But we could hardly, in good conscience under our responsi-

bility under the parole, sponsor him for U.S. immigration. It

took a whitewash and pretended belief in his tales to accomplish

that.

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Now I want to address myself to the question of disposal.

Here the extent of CIA's irrational involvement with

Nosenko becomes blatant. Mr. Hart read (with relish, according

to my friends who watched on TV) selected items from some

penciled jottings in my handwriting which left with you the

impression that I had contemplated or considered (even "sug-

gested" as more than one newspaperman understood him) such

measures as liquidation, drugging, or confinement in mental

institutions.

I state unequivocally, under oath, that :

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- First, no such measures were ever seriously considered.

- Second, no such measures were ever studied.

(What "loony bin"? How "make him nuts"? What drugs to

induce forgetfulness? I know of none now and never did,

nor did I ever try to find out if such exist. The whole

subject of "liquidation" was taboo in the CIA for

reasons with which I wholeheartedly agreed then and

still do.)

- Third, no such measures were ever suggested as a course

of action, even in intimate personal conversations.

- Fourth, no such measures were ever proposed at any

level of the Agency.

Of course, Mr. Helms, when he testified before you,

hadn't heard of those penciled notes; neither had anyone else.

I do not remember making any such notes. And I have had

much time to try to remember. However, I can imagine how I

night have.

Responsible as I was for this "abominable" case,

was called upon to help find the best way to release Nosenko --

without a confession but sure that he was an enemy agent. In an

effort to find something meriting serious consideration, I

suppose that I jotted down, one day, every theoretically con-

ceivable action.

Some of them might have been

mentioned in one

form or another by others; I doubt they all sprang from my

mind. (I cannot even guess what "points I through 4" might have

been, the ones Mr. Hart declined to read because they were

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"unimportant." I guess that means they weren't damning to me.)

But the fact that the notes were penciled reveals that they were

intended to be transient; the fact that "liquidation" was in-

cluded reveals that they were theoretical; and their loose,

undignified language reveals that they were entirely personal,

for my fleeting use only. In fact, none of these courses of

action

could have been morally acceptable to me nor conceivaule

as a practical suggestion to higher authority.

Mr. Hart admitted, or proudly claimed, that he himself

discovered these notes in the files. Although he recognized

their purely personal nature, that they were not addressed nor

intended for any other person, nor had any practical intent, he

chose to bring them to show-and-tell to the committee and to

the American public. Did he feel this a moral duty? Or was it

simply part of his evident intent to deride and destroy any

opposition to Nosenko? Could he have done it for reasons of

personal spite? Whatever the answer, the cost seems too high:

he was discrediting his own Agency for a matter without

substance.

I cannot remember any concrete proposal for "disposal"'

being made during my tenure. You understand, of course, that

"disposal"

is merely professional jargon for ending a relation-

ship which began with "acquisition." Those are two words that

go together, being "acquisition" and "disposal." The course the

Agency eventually adopted seems, in retrospect, the only

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practical one. I think the Agency did well to rehabilitate

Nosenko and, as I thought, put him out to pasture.

However, I cannot understand why they then employed him as

an advisor, as a teacher of their staff trainees in counter-

intelligence. The concrete suspicions of Nosenko have never

been resolved, and because they are well-founded, they never

will "be cleared up and go away." Mr. Hart and Admiral Turner

may frivolously dismiss them, as they have done before your

committee, but the doubts are still there and it is irrespon-

sible to expose clandestine personnel to this individual.

In conclusion, Mr. Hart's testimony was a curious perfor-.

mance. One wonders what could drive a Government agency into

the position of:

- trying to discredit and bury under a pile of

irrelevancies the reasons to suspect that the

Soviet Union sent to America a provocateur to

mislead us about the assassin of President

Kennedy ;

- pleading irrationally and misleadingly in favor

of a KGB man about whom serious doubts persist;

- misrepresenting, invidiously, its own prior

action;

- denigrating publicly the competence and performance

of duty of its own officers;

- dredging up unsubstantial personal notes, left

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carelessly in a highly secret file folder, to

falsely suggest in public the planning by its

own people of the vilest forms of misconduct.

As the Congress is conspicuously aware, the veil of

secrecy can hide irresponsibility and incompetence. But

behind that veil the CIA used to maintain unusually high

standards. of honor and decency and responsibility, and did a

pretty competent job, often in the face of impossible demands.

The decline of these qualities is laid bare by Mr. Hart's

testimony -- to the Agency's discredit, to my own dismay, and to

the detriment of future recruitment of good men, who will not

want to make careers in an environment without integrity.

The Agency need not have gone so far. After all, Nosenko's

bona fides had been officially certified. Those who disagreed

were judged at its highest level to have "besmirched the

Agency's escutcheon." Not only are they out of the way, but

"everything possible" is being done to see that no one chal-

lenges Nosenko or his ilk, ever again. The Agency need only

have said this much, and no more.

That Admiral Turner's personal emissary went so much

further suggests that the Agency may not, after all,

be quite so

sure of its position. Perhaps it fears that this committee,

wondering about this defector's strange reporting and uncon-

strained by. CIA's official line, might innocently cry out, "But

the emperor has no clothes!" This might explain the spray of

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mud, to cloud your view.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before

this committee. My only regret is that I have not had the

opportunity to answer publicly charges that have been made in

public. And I should also like to point out in closing that in

making this presentation and in responding to your questions

today I may be limited by the fact that the Agency has denied me

access to certain documents which I requested be made available..

With that in mind, I will be happy to address any questions you

may have.

Mr. Preyer. Thank you, Mr. Bagley.

Mr. Fithian, Mr. Klein will be recognized for questioning.

Would you prefer to ask questions before Mr. Klein?

Mr. Fithian. No.

Mr. Preyer. I recognize Mr. Klein at this time.

Mr. Klein. Mr. Bagley, you referred in your testimony to

the memo that was provided to this committee by Mr. Hart. The

actual memo was not provided; a typewritten copy of that account

was provided, JFK E-427. I will ask the clerk to show you a

copy of that document.

Mr. Chairman, that has already been previously marked into

evidence in previous hearings.

In looking at that document, do you recognize the words as

being your own?

Mr. Bagley:

No, as I said in my testimony; I can't

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remember any such document. However, I wish to point out that I

also said it is not at all inconceivable to me that such a

document existed, and I did write it.

Mr. Klein. Some of the questions I will be directing to

you refer to the letter; I believe that is also being put into

the record. It is JFK Exhibit 136.

You have testified that you were directly responsible for

the case of the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko from 1961 to 1962; is

that correct?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Klein. Was learning what Nosenko knew of Lee Harvey

Oswald a major objective of the CIA during those years?

Mr. Bagley. This question has arisen in some of the

previous questions I have read. There may be some question

about the word "major."

I would like to say the question of Lee Harvey Oswald was

major indeed in our thoughts. We had in our custody the only

witness to Oswald's life in the Soviet Union.. So it was

certainly important.

The information which Nosenko gave about Oswald was so

circumscribed, so rigid that we took it, we questioned him, as

you know, and got to what we thought were the limits of his

knowledge. It was not expanded to anything he really lived

through.. It was there. We thought we had it. We questioned

him in Geneva, I think twice. It is in the record. We talked

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to him here about it. The Bureau had him then afterward, In

the conditions of detention it was part of the systematic.

questioning

to which I referred in my testimony. It was dealt

with

seriously. But I don't believe we had much hope of

getting any deeper into it. We thought, Mr. Klein, that we had

what Nosenko had to say about Oswald. Now whether that's giving

it proper importance, it was -- well, of course it was important,

but we didn't keep going back day after day for 1,000 days to

keep asking him, can you think anything more about it?

The answer is yes, it's important; no, we didn't pound on

it incessantly as perhaps a major or important subject might be

pounded on. But I say even now, having read excerpts of your

talks with him and having seen one or two things change, I would

say, perhaps we would have made changes in his story.

-

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Mr. Klein.

Was determining whether Nosenko was telling

the truth about Oswald, was

that a major objective?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, it was.

Mr. Klein.. And did you believe at that time that if

Nosenko was lying about Oswald, that that could have immense

implications?

Mr. Bagley. Yes. But the lying about Oswald was, in

this sense, parallel to the lying about several other things,

a lot of other things.

As you saw, when I took this one case, the case of Lee

Harvey Oswald, and took it through our or my thought processes,

if you like, I couldn't find any logical or any illogical

explanation for why he said what he said about Oswald..

so, of course, fly finding out why he was saying it or

whether he was telling the truth was of immense importance.

As you see, independent of all of the other aspects of

Nosenko's bona fides, we could come to a point of extreme

doubt of his bona fides solely on the basis of the Oswald

case.

Mr. Klein. Now, you quoted from our own report about the

detail and specificity of the July 3 and July 27 interro-

gations of Nosenko, when he was asked about Oswald in the

Soviet Union.

Do you know of any other sessions when Nosenko was ques-

tioned specifically in detail about Oswald and Oswald's --

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about Oswald in the Soviet Union?

Mr. Bagley. I don't know. I can't remember. I cannot

remember. I do know that in our office we spent -- now, in

my office at this time, Mr. Chairman, I would like to point

out, as I mentioned in my opening remarks about my career,

that during the period from 1962 to about 1965 I was in charge

of counterintelligence within the Soviet bloc -- Soviet

Russia division.

We were the operational element probably most closely

involved with the Soviet intelligence aspects of what would

come out in the Oswald case, along with the counterintelligence

staff, as you know.

We did--because we had sources, defectors and experts

at

our behest--we did dig. We thought, well, what can we supply,

how can we shed some light on this thing. This was

on every-

body's mind, and it was extremely important to us.

I remember, for example, the passing out of questions to

certain defectors who were working with us from the KGBl

predecessor organization, and their information, their

questions, their comments, were brought into us and to the best

of my knowledge were made available to the Warren Commission.

This is not Nosenko, you remember. This is other sources

about Oswald.

There were a number of questions which Mr. Epstein got

and published in his book as an appendix, through the Freedom

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of Information Act, which came from my section. He calls it

44 questions, but the way it is organized in the book it is

a lot more than 44 questions because each one is a group of

questions.

Now, we passed that to the CIA staff, which was our

channel and liaison to the bureau, and it was passed to the

bureau, and there was a big back and forth about whether they

would or wouldn't service these questions in their dealings

with Nosenko.

They were quite detailed questions, as they had to do with

Soviet procedures primarily. Those questions were, I gather,

never serviced by the bureau.

I can only say in retrospect -- and here my memory fails

me slightly -- that by giving them in through channels to be

put to Nosenko, somehow we dropped them because I don't believe

that the conditions of detention, I don't think those so-

called 44 questions were put to Nosenko.

When I look back on it, that is something that I would

have to answer did we do absolutely everything, I think it

would have been extremely interesting, and I don't quite

understand if we didn't why we didn't.

Mr. Klein. I lost one point you were making. You said

you gave them to the bureau, and the bureau did not ask the

questions, bureau meaning --

Mr. Bagley. The FBI.

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Mr. Klein.. Didn't the CIA have custody of Nosenko at all

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times?

Mr. Bagley. No. As has been said, custody is not the

word here. Responsibility for the questioning of Nosenko on

Lee Harvey Oswald was very firmly in the hands of the FBI.

Believe me, we were extremely conscious of this, and if my

memory is right, I believe we were enjoined at the time not

to question him.

Certainly there was no doubt that by giving him the body,

the man, Nosenko, into the hands of the FBI for as long as

they wanted -- I am talking now about conditions of liberty,

of course, in this period, immediately after his defection --

that the United States -- the appropriate United States organ-

ization for the inquiry into Nosenko's knowledge of Lee Harvey

, our duty

Oswaldwas accomplished.

We had given him, and it was the bureau's job. They did

their questioning.

You know, I don't know to this day exactly what they asked

him. I learned more from your staff report than I had known

before.

Mr. Klein. Is it your testimony that the agency was

constrained from asking Nosenko questions about Oswald's

activities in Russia because the FBI had primary jurisdiction

in this?

Mr. Bagley.

Yes, I think so.

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Mr. Klein. Even Oswald's activities abroad?

Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes. That was the only thing that

Nosenko could bring to the FBI. That was all Nosenko had, is

Oswald in Russia.

Mr. Klein. That was the full extent of Nosenko's testi-

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mony?

Mr. Bagley. Yes,

he was allegedly a KGB officer who had

dealt with the case within the KGB.

Of course, this was all

he had to offer. The fact that this was handed -- the bureau

had this authority, or this responsibility, it was perfectly

clear to us at the time.

Mr. Klein. How was this matter made "known to you, that

the FBI would do all questioning -- would be responsible for

questioning Nosenko about Oswald's activities in Russia? How

was that made known to you?

Mr. Bagley. I don't remember. It must have been a result

of normal interagency liaison, although nothing was really

very normal about anything having to do with the President's

assassination.

I would suggest that the best person to answer that

question would be someone on the counterintelligence staff

which controlled directly our liaison with the FBI.

Mr. Klein. Mr. Chairman, I would ask at this time to

have --

Mr. Fithian.

Mr. Klein, may I interrupt just a minute

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I would like to ask a question on this, and if I ask it

later it will be as disjointed

as can be.

If the FBI had responsibility for the questioning of

Oswald, which I believe you just said --

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Fithian. -- how then could you testify earlier, as

I believe I understood you to testify, that the questions

you asked and the answers you received from Oswald -- from

Nosenko about Oswald, I think you said the Oswald case alone

disproved Nosenko's bona fides.

Mr. Bagley. I didn't say disproved. I said it was

factor in testing of bona fides. I don't think I said dis-

proved because the word "prove" is a tricky one in this case.

Mr. Fithian.. That is not the burden of my question. The

burden of my question is if there was this clear jurisdictional

division, are you saying, or aren't you saying that the CIA

did or did not question Oswald -- question Nosenko intensely or

otherwise about Oswald.

Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes, I would be glad to review what I

said about that.

During the period when we were dealing with Mr. Nosenko.

in Geneva, we -- this was an active hot operational matter,

there was no question of FBI at all--we were

face to face

with a man who was in the jargon of the agency, was an agent

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in place -- Nosenko before his defection, who was meeting us

under clandestine circumstances in Geneva. He was telling us

about Lee Harvey Oswald.

We, of course, took that and got it as straight and as

thoroughly as we could under those circumstances.

After he defected and came to the United States, it was,

through the channels that Mr. Klein is interested in -- it

was made clear tha the FBI, as the primary investigative

agency on the President's assassination, would manage the

further and detailed questioning of Mr. Nosenko in the United

States on his knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Later, after the detention -- as I mentioned, we tried

to get some sort of admissions from Nosenko by the act of

hostile interrogation. Those, as far as I remember -- there

were no questions involved in there because there were no

contradictions about Oswald, and I don't think that was part of

our hostile interrogation.

But subsequent to the hostile interrogation, as I say,

we were able for the first time because this man had

resisted it earlier, we were able to ask him the kinds of

questions we would have asked him had he been free, any normal

defector.

We got to the questions and back to the questions of Lee

Harvey Oswald in the course of that systematic debriefing. That,

I think, will explain the dates, Mr. Klein, that are in your

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report, which I didn't know, I don't remember. They

were the

3rd and 27th of July.

Again, I learned from the report or I was reminded by

the report that the detention and the hostile interrogation began

in early April. As I remember it, the systematic questioning

continued through the

summer, and as a part of that questioning,

not with any expectation that there was more to come, that we

would have to contribute about Oswald, but because we wanted

to do everything we could to get his full story before the

Warren Commission closed its doors, we did ask him about these

matters.

The result was --

Mr. Fithian. Even though at that time you did not have --

the FBI still had jurisdiction?

Mr. Bagley. The question wasn't -- in fact, Mr. Fithian,

the question was no longer, I think -- we didn't feel any

constraint during this period of detention. There was nothing

preventing us from talking to Nosenko about Oswald.

The only thing that may have inhibited us was the

conviction that he had no more to say about it. Certainly

I think the comparison of what we got in Geneva, and the

rather systematic questioning in July, there wasn't any more

substance to it.

He was making certain statements, and those statements

were either true or not true, But, they were certainly very

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limited. I think we could list the number of facts he gave us

about the Oswald case, and they would not be a very long

list. They have to do with how he heard abou it and what he

heard about Oswald's attempt at suicide, about Oswald's

psychological assessment they did or did not do in the KGB,

or in a Soviet hospital, on Oswald. These facts lined up

have not changed and they have not increased by subsequent

questionings. And I think by the time we were talking about,

while Nosenko was in detention and we could have asked him

as many questions as we wanted to, I think our feeling was

that we had his story. And I think subsequent events have

borne that out.

The only thing I regret, as I say, is that those forty-

four questions which we had passed to the FBI, I don't think

we should have felt any inhibition about asking Nosekno those

at that time. I don't think anybody should have any

inhibitions about asking Mr. Nosenko those questions today.

So I hope that answers your question.

Mr. Fithian. I was just unclear --

Mr. Bagley. While he was in detention, we didn't

feel strongly constrained. There was not much thought --

the Bureau was always -- the FBI was

always aware that if

they wanted to talk to Mr. Nosenko again, that they could

have him at any time they wanted. There was no question

of keeping him away from the FBI. With the FBI's knowledge

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of this case, the FBI's interest in this case, he was always

there. If they wanted to come

to the CIA and say, "Look, you

are custodians of Mr. Nosekno. We would like to talk to him,"

they would have talked to him again.

Mr. Fithian. The reason I raised the question was I

inferred from your response to Mr. Klein you somehow felt

ruled out jurisdictionally, because that was the FBI's

province.

Mr. Bagley. I would say prior to the detention, yes.

Mr. Fithian. Only for one time frame.

Mr. Bagley. Yes. I think from the time of his

defection, or the time of his arrival in the United States

until the detention. And as I say, the detention was designed

to do a hostile interrogation, not to question him

systematically. In fact, the hostile interrogation was a

confused and confusing operation which didn't succeed, but

it was

strictly focused on contradictions in his story.

And as I state, there were few enough, if any, contradictions

visible within his story of Oswald that there was nothing

there we could hook onto and use with any impact.

Mr. Fithian. Thank you.

Mr. Klein. Is it your testimony that whether it be

very early or later on that the CIA did make every effort

to get all the information from Mr. Nosenko that it could

get and to find the truth -- all the information from Nosenko

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about Oswald that it could get, and to determine whether

that information was true or not?

Mr. Bagley. There are two questions, I think. I

separated them in my letter. The question did we get all

the information. And then you said --

Mr. Klein. You attempted to get all the information

from Nosenko about Oswald. You can take that one first.

Mr. Bagley. Okay. It would be very easy, and I would

in good conscience say yes. But over these past weeks I have

had a lot of time to think about it, what did we know, what

could we have done. And the only thing that sticks in my mind

right now that would have been perhaps useful for the record

was to ask him those questions which our experts, knowing

internal Soviet procedures, had dredged up about -- which

were not all to do with Oswald, and they had nothing to do with

his knowledge of Oswald. They had

to do with Oswald's own

story, which has to do with his meeting with Marina, his

permission to marry Marina, his exit of Marina from the Soviet

Union, all of these things that have to do with Soviet

internal procedures, where we consider ourselves particularly

well informed, because we had access to some former KGB

people who knew these procedures.

By the way, they have said, they said at that time --

well; their reaction to the story was quite violent. I under-

stand that you have talked to some defectors on this subject.

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But the reaction of the KGB men to the Oswald and

Marina story, and most particularly to Nosenko's story about

the failure to talk to him, and the ease with which he married

this lady and so forth, they believed that this is not possible

as given. Strongly they believe that.

Mr. Klein. I think my question sort of got lost. But

is it your testimony that at some point the CIA did try to

get all the information that they could from Nosenko that he

knew about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. About Nosenko's knowledge of Oswald, yes.

Mr. Klein. And at some point did the CIA try to do its

best, do whatever was possible to determine whether the

information Nosenko gave about Oswald was true?

Mr. Bagley. I would say our efforts in this respect

would be on two planes.

One is to check out the facts, and

those facts, as I think Mr. Helms told you here, can only

be found within the files of the KGB. And secondly, to find

out whether Nosenko as such is telling a true story. In.

other words, is his story -- is all of his story true, and

therefore is his story of Oswald potentially true. And in

that latter respect, I would say we made a heroic but unsuccess+

ful effort. I say unsuccessful, because we didn't prove it.

As I told you today -- I hope I got over to you the

fact that I am convinced that the story cannot be true.

But that was the result of a long and strenuous effort.

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So my answer to your second question is yes, indeed.

Mr. Klein. It is also your testimony that prior to the

hostile interrogations, the CIA did not concentrate on the

Oswald question because the FBI had primary responsibility for

that issue, even though it dealt with Oswald's activities in

Russia.

Mr. Bagley: Correct.

Mr. Klein. Mr. Chairman, I would ask that at this time

I read into the record page 7 from a document received from

the FBI which is responses to questions that this committee

posed to the FBI. I cannot put the entire document into

evidence because portions of it are secret. But the portion

I propose

to read is unclassified.

The question posed to the FBI by this committee was

"Did either the FBI or the CIA have primary responsibility

for investigating Nosenko's statements about Oswald. If

neither had primary responsibility, was there any division

of responsibility?"

The answer, and I am quoting: "The FBI had primary

responsibility for investigating Nosenko's statements about

Oswals that pertained to his, Oswald's, activities in the

United States, including the assassination of President

Kennedy. The CIA had primary responsibility for investigating

Nosenko's statements about Oswald's activities abroad."

Mr. Bagley. I find that absolutely incomprehensible,

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because Nosenko could not conceivably have known anything

about Oswald's activities in the United States. The FBI

would have had nothing to talk to him about.

Mr. Klein. In effect, what this document would seem

to say is that for everything that Nosenko knew about Lee

Harvey Oswald, the CIA had primary responsibility of finding

it out and investigating it.

Mr. Bagley. Absolutely, that is what that document

says to me, yes. Because it couldn't possibly have been

the agreement between the FBI and CIA at that time because,

as I say, there is no use talking to a Moscow-based internal

security officer of the KGB about a man, a former Marine

of the United States, who came to the United States -- who had

lived in the United States before he came to Russia, came back

to the United States after he lived in Russia, and at some

point along the way killed the President of the United States.

How in the world would this man have had anything to say on

the subject?

In fact, he would have shrugged and said, "No,

I don't know anything about it."

Mr. Klein. So we draw the conclusion from this that

the CIA was of the opinion that the FBI had responsibility

in this area and at the same time the FBI was of the opinion

that the CIA had the primary responsibility in this area?

Mr. Bagley. Certainly not. The FBI talked to this

man for days. They could have terminated their so-called

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responsibility in five minutes had they thought that we

were responsible, the CIA was responsible for talking to him

about everything to do with Oswald in Russia.

Mr. Klein. Well, you are disputing that statement, is

that right?

Mr. Bagley.

Oh, yes. And I have a feeling that there

is some misunderstanding there. I can't believe that anybody

said that seriously.

I have no memory of any such thing being said at the

time because - perhaps they meant, you know -- it couldn't

mean that they felt that the FBI had -- no, they were talking

about Oswald, not about Nosenko. No, I cannot understand it.

Mr. Klein.

So, you dispute that.

Mr. Bagley. Oh, of course.

Mr. Klein. Well --

Mr. Bagley. But I suspect it is a misunderstanding,

rather than a misstatement.

Mr. Klein. You testified earlier that you did not recall

any other sessions where Nosenko was asked detailed specific

questions about Oswald in Russia, other than the July 3 and

July 27 statements, which were mentioned in our report, is

that correct?

Mr. Bagley. That is correct. One reason I think perhaps

you have the whole picture is that there were pretty careful

records kept. In response to your questions to the agency,

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65

or -- I am sure you had got all of the pertinent files, and

had there been anything else, it would have been clearly

indicated.

Mr. Klein. I should state for the record we have read

those files, and we know of no others.

Do you have any recollection of how long these two sessions

were in time?

Mr. Bagley. You mean the July session?

Mr. Klein. July 3 and July 27.

Mr. Bagley. No. I take it that information came from

document. Did it give any indication of the time? Because

--

Mr. Klein. I should state for the record the sessions

are on tape.

Mr. Bagley. Well, then, there must be a way to know.

Mr. Klein. How many hours, as an experienced security.

officer, considering what you have told us was of importance

to this question of Oswald -- how many hours do you think that

the agency should have devoted to questioning Nosenko about

Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. I would give you a practical answer to that

question. When you are faced with a man who is telling you a

limited number of facts, which have a very clear limit, you

can ask him the questions, and you can write down the answers,

and you can ask him the same questions or related questions all

day long.

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But I think that we felt that we had touched his limits,

and we didn't just feel it, we experienced it, and that had we

talked more and more and more we wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Therefore, I cannot guess how many hours one should spend

asking the same questions.

I would add, by way of comment to your question, that had

he lived through the experience as he said, we could have talked

with him for days.

Because you have a situation where a case

officer named Rostrusin, or Krupnov, if this man walks up,

and they talk about it, and then they go out and have a drink,

or they live through these experiences, that Oswald had been

a hotel, and that there was this Soviet Intourist woman who

was in touch with him, what exactly what is her relationships

with both KGB and what did she think about this guy, and did

you talk to her and when -- these are things which would go

on and on and on had there been a genuine contact.

But the one thing I have noticed is that your complete

information about Oswald and ourselves or the FBI's runs to

a few pages,

never more.

You can't expand it. You reached

the limit.

Therefore, my answer to your question is I can't

guess how long you can spend on this man, but I don't think

it is any longer than we did spend.

Mr. Klein. Is it your testimony that five or six hours

would be adequate for this issue?:

Mr. Bagley. I am sorry. That is a very difficult question

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to answer.

Mr. Klein. I should state for the record that the committee

has heard the tapes of these two sessions and they lasted,

combined, approximately five or six hours. That is where the

figure comes from.

Mr. Bagley. I don't know. You are talking about a matter

of hours -- was it six hours or 12 hours or even 30 hours.

Perhaps there could have been more.

Mr. Klein. Now, are you familiar with the person who

questioned Oswald on July 3 or July 27?

Mr. Bagley. No, I can't remember who it was. . If you tell

me his name, I am sure I would remember. But -- it was

presumably a member of my division, or my section, I would

say -- at that time the counterintelligence section of the

Soviet division.

Mr. Klein. My only hesitation is --

Mr. Bagley. It doesn't matter.

Mr. Klein.

-- is the security aspect.

Mr. Bagley. Unless you want to ask me about some

document. Excuse me for my question.

Mr. Klein. What I do want to ask you is do you think

if you have Nosenko, as he is speaking about Oswald, and you

said it was

an important issue, that the person who questioned

Nosenko about Oswald should be somebody who is experienced in

KGB -- questioning KGB defectors.

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Mr. Bagley. I don't know. You have people available for

questioning, and their manner of questioning is more or less

detailed, and more or less competent, depending on their

training, and depending on their personal inclinations or

capacities.

Everybody has to get his experience somewhere. I think

many officers I have known have done brilliant and complete

interrogations without any prior experience.

No, I don't think it is necessarily relevant to be

systematic about this. There was an implication in one of the

reports I read thatthis man had not carefully studied the

matter of Oswald before asking the questions of Nosenko. I

think probably more could have been done there.

Mr. Klein. When you say that everyone has to get their

experience somewhere, do you think that this situation would

have been a proper place to give somebody experience in

questioning a KGB defector, talking about Lee Harvey Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, I think it would -- in other words,

it is not grotesque, it is not unheard of to have a competent

person -- I am sure that the man who was sent -- as I say, I

don't remember who it was -- I am sure he was not an incompe-

tent.

When we are talking about questioning anybody about

anything, we are talking about a personal capability, personal

professional competence, rather than experience, let's say,

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with a Soviet defector, or with anybody else. He could go

down and question a businessman about his business.

Mr. Klein. Well, to question a businessman, say, about

his business,

do you think that he would have been very familiar

in the facets of the business -- and my question is, would

the person who questioned Nosenko about Oswald, would you

expect that that person should be very familiar with the facts

of Oswald's life and especially everything we knew about

Oswald in Russia?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Klein. And this committee, as is stated in the

report, questioned, took a deposition from the particular

agent who was assigned to question Nosenko about Oswald, and

was the only agent who performed that questioning on the 3rd

of July and the 27th of July, and he stated that his knowledge

of Oswald came from the media, what he had read as all of us

look at the newspapers and hear on television.

Do you think that that is a satisfactory way to investi-

gate what Nosenko knew about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. The word "satisfactory" is a difficult one.

Mr. Klein. Adequate.

Mr. Bagley. Certainly not maximum. Certainly not

desirable. No, I would be inclined to think that it was not --

it was certainly not maximum.

Mr. Klein. Do you think that had the person who questioned

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Nosenko been very familiar with all aspects of Oswald, and

experienced in KGB, and spent more than five or six hours

questioning Nosenko about Oswald, and perhaps the CIA would

have come up with more relevant information in determining

whether Nosenko was telling the truth about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. No.

Mr. Klein. You state in your report that the chairman

of this committee, due to Mr. Hart's confusing testimony --

Mr. Fithian. Mr. Klein, are you departing that particular

line of questioning now? ￾

Mr. Klein. I am going to come back to it. But you

certainly can ask a question now.

Mr. Fithian. I have had the feeling, subjective, today

that perhaps, hearing your testimony and what else we have

found out, that it would be fair to characterize your major

interest in Nosenko as not being Oswald -- either because you

touched the limits of his knowledge, information, or for what-

ever reason--and that it would be fair to say that your real

interest in Nosenko, as an individual, was the potential

penetration of American government, potential penetration of

your own agency, determining whether he was sent here to

mislead your agency, sent here to undermine Mr. X, whatever.

In other words, the intelligence operations that he

might be able to lead you to

were of a great deal more

interest to you than Oswald. Isn't that fair to say?

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Mr. Bagley. No, no, it isn't, Mr. Fithian.

I would like to correct some of the impressions given in

this field by Mr. Hart, among others.

During the period of Nosenko's clandestine meetings with

us before his defection, and during the period of his

questioning under conditions of freedom in the United States,

he was treated -- and his information was gone at -- precisely

as would any other defector.

The most important information he had to offer was got

at, priorities were established, he was questioned on every-

thing he knew including Oswald. During the period of

confinement, he was also questioned on Oswald.

Now, if the case

as a whole seems to bear this counter-

intelligence flavor, I would like to say that is probably

determined by the fact that Mr. Nosenko was an internal

security officer of the KGB. He was questioned early on,

both in Geneva and here, on his knowledge of anything to do

with Soviet politics, Soviet personalities, on the economic

or internal relationships with the leadership, any type of

policy information that he could give from his knowledge, as a

KGB officer.

These are things which

• some KGB officers have had know-

ledge of. In other words, we don't write them off. They are

not nearly as valuable as sources of intelligence are; for

example, officers of the Soviet army or the Soviet military

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intelligence.

But nonetheless, they are not necessarily zerodd,

especially having to do with political information. I would

say we made every effort to get what this man had on other

things, that we were not just slanting our questions in order

to determine whether he was a plant.

However, during

that questioning we continually found

reason to suspect that he was

a plant, but that was not our

purpose as it has been stated to this committee.

Our purpose was to get what he knew. He didn't know much.

That is a fact. That isn't our preconception, as Mr. Hart --

Mr. Fithian. You mean he didn't know much about any

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area?

Mr. Bagley. No, sir. Well, what do you mean by any

area?

Mr. Fithian. The areas you questioned him on.

Mr. Bagley. The areas I mentioned, on Soviet politics,

economics and so on, he knew effectively nothing. He had

nothing that was of any intelligence value.

Mr. Fithian. Well, I had some other questions, but that

would kind of lead us far astray.

Mr. Klein. I don't have a whole lot more.

You stated in your letter that the chairman of the

committee, due to the confusing testimony of Mr. Hart, was

led to state that no investigation of Oswald's activities

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as known to Nosenko have been made.

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Klein. And that that was incorrect?

Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes.

Mr. Klein. Would you tell us specifically what the CIA

did to investigate what Nosenko said about Oswald in Russia?

Mr. Bagley. The context of that statement, by the way,

as is put in my letter, has to do with the getting -- it is in

the paragraph of that letter which talks about getting the

information from, even though we are talking about investi-

gation.

This is as I read the transcript. It may not be correct.

It may have meant indeed the investigation of the information

which had been gotten.

Mr. Klein. Right. Distinguishing taking a statement

from investigation, using investigation in that way, would you

tell us what specifically wad done to investigate this case.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, with pleasure.

First of all, the best way to investigate it is to check

parallel sources of information. In this case, the only

parallel source of information which could tell us, confirm or

deny whether Lee Harvey Oswald had of had not been questioned

by the KGB, or had or had not had any relations with the KGB,

or some of the other things Nosenko said, could only come

from the KGB, or Intourist, or from some of the personalities

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in contact with Nosenko in Russia. We had no such sources.

Secondly, we would probably go into -- I am not sure what

the technical term here is -- we would consult experts. We

would take Nosenko's information and see whether it made

sense in terms of the knowledge, our knowledge of the Soviet

Union.

That would not be a reference merely to files. That would

be the questioning of all available sources on this subject.

That is the point I made, that we did go back to every one of

our defectors,

not only on Nosenko's story, but on Oswald's

story, directly.

That would be about all -- except finally the attempt to

determine how valid that information was in terms of the man's

total credibility, which means investigation under interro-

gation.

Mr. Klein. Now, consulting of experts -- you told us

that although you spoke to some defectors, that they never

used the questions, is that right?

Mr. Bagley. No, no, no. They made reports. .

They made

comments and reports about internal Soviet procedures which

bore on the Oswald story. Oh, yes, they did that. They made

reports.

Mr. Klein. So, since, as you say, you could not go to the

KGB, the only investigation that the CIA did in this matter

was to consult other defectors about procedures in the KGB?

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Mr. Bagley. Other defectors, other knowledge available to

the American intelligence community.

Mr. Klein. Well, what specifically?

Mr. Bagley. Excuse me?

Mr. Klein. I say other than defectors, who else did you

specifically talk to, to investigate:

Mr. Bagley. Talk to? Oh, let me think. Talk to. May I

ask you to be very precise in your question as to what aspects

of the story you might be talking about? Is it Nosenko's

story of Oswald? Because if it is, it has to do with the

procedures of admission to the Soviet Union, the series of

events that occurred to Oswald in the Soviet Union, the

suicide, and things of that sort.

Mr. Klein. And you are saying that you investigated

1 this--

these statements by Nosenko how, by speaking to--

Mr. Bagley. Well, who would know about, let's say,

procedures for the admission of people into the Soviet Union.

Who would know about -- the main source, the most valued

source we have ever had on things from this very closed

society, where these regulations and these procedures are in

no sense open to the public, the best source we have had, of

course, is defectors and that is over a large number of years--

many years.

The result has been we have accumulated this information,

and have turned out general reports and kept them up-to-date

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on what certain Soviet procedures are.

Those would be consulted.

In other words, written reports,

background information.

Surely we checked that.

Mr. Klein. So in general you checked the reports that had

been accumulated over the years, but not specifically written

for this case.

Mr. Bagley. And then questioned people specifically about

this case, those sources we had.

Mr. Klein. Who did you question, without saying a name --

if you questioned defectors, how many?

Mr. Bagley. Defectors.

Mr. Klein. How many did you question?

Mr. Bagley. Certainly a minimum of three, and as many

perhaps as, I would guess -- my memory really isn't sure

because I wasn't as closely aware of some of these other

things -- I would imagine that we sou-ght or got reports

from more than those three, the three that I know of. How

many more, I don't remember.

Mr. Klein. And were their records and files of what

these -- all the people that you questioned, are those

records all made, of what they said when asked specifically

to comment on this case?

Mr. Bagley. I don't know that, Mr. Klein. I don't know.

Mr. Klein. And other than the number of defectors, at

least three, anybody else that you questioned, or did you do

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anything else to investigate what Nosenko said about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. The word investigation is bothering me a

little. I don't know what you mean. If you mean to look

into it, to verify it by whatever information we had about

Russia, what other sources

are

avaialble? You have overt

information, and you have information which has come from

covert sources.

Mr. Klein. What I am saying is -- I am not stating at

this time that there are other possibilities. I am just asking

what -- is that the extent. of what you did to investigate it?

MI. Bagley. We are talkingabout Nosenko's story, which is

Oswald in Russia.

Mr. Klein. Yes.

Mr. Bagley. What you do to investigate that in the

United States is go down to the neighborhood and you go talk

to people. But we had no such access to people inside the

Soviet Union. THere was a tremendous limit to our ability to

investigate this information.

Therefore, if these outsiders, talking about procedures,

or what would or wouldn't be done normally, sounds like a

somewhat inadequate means of investigation, it was the only

one at our disposal.

Mr. Klein. As I say, your statement is that there was

investigation. I am just trying to ascertain --

Mr. Bagley: I mentioned investigation on those three

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grounds, the third of those grounds being the attempt by

interrogation to get at the veracity of Nosenko in general, and

Nosenko as a source on Oswald.

Mr. Klein. And we have already discussed the extent of

the questioning of Nosenko on the Oswald matter. That was

those two sessions.

Mr. Bagley. The questioning of Nosenko on the Oswald

matter was limited to these two sessions, I believe, because

you have told me so -- plus the session is in Geneva.

Mr. Klein. Do you recollect in Geneva that you spoke in

details with Nosenko about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. The words "in detail" are hard to say

because the conditions of a clandestine meeting are never

satisfactory. You cannot sit down and be systematic because

you don't have that much time. There are other things we

talked about.

Mr. Klein. Did you ever question Marina Oswald about what

happened in Russia when she was with Oswald, and compare that

to what Nosenko was giving you?

Mr. Bagley. To my knowledge the CIA had no access

whatsoever to Marina Oswald, and I have no knowledge of any

CIA contact with her at any time.

Mr. Klein: Did you ever ask the FBI to question her

specifically about the issues you were interested in?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

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Mr. Klein. Is there a written request for that?

Mr. Bagley. I would suspect so, yes.

Mr. Klein. And did you get any answer back?

Mr. Bagley. No.

Mr. Klein. The FBI --

Mr. Bagley. No, I don't believe that we would have asked

them to ask her something to tell us because this would have

been a violation of what the FBI considered its charter in

this case.

Mr. Klein. So you didn't ask them.

Mr. Bagley. We would give them questions to ask her.

We

would reuqest them or suggest to them that they ask Marina

certain questions. That, yes, but not with the idea of

reporting back to us because we wouldn't have any right to do

that.

Mr. Klein.. You wouldn't have any right to have the FBI

give you their reports on Marina Oswald?

Mr. Bagley.

Oh, yes, we would have a right to ask them

to give the reports. But we didn't say why don't you ask this.

This is essentially why we are doing it. We gave them a

request for information and said will you go ask these

questions.

That is the history of the famous 44 questions I spoke

about a moment ago.

Mr. Klein. Weren't you interested in the answers to

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compare it to what Nosenko was telling you?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, indeed. But -- the answers to --

Mr. Klein. That Marina gave the FBI, to compare it to

what Nosenko told you what happened?

Mr. Bagley. We would have been very happy to have answers

from Marina, and asked these questions. But we could not

operate through the FBI to do this. I think this is a thing

that has come up in previous testimony. I think we were

constrained, that the bureau felt very strongly it was their

responsibility.

Mr. Klein. Did you ever make any attempt to study

files you had on other people who had defected, Americans who

had defected to the Soviet Union, and check what happened to

them, and compare them to Oswald's?

Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes, and the people whowere doing that --

by the way, I want to stress here that the agency component

primarily responsible -- I told you about our wholehearted

effort and tremendous interest in this. But the agency

component handling the agency's requirements on Lee Harvey

Oswald were in fact the counterintelligence staff. They indeed

did look into the experience of other defectors..

Mr. Klein. Were their reports made on this?

Mr. Bagley. I don't know.

Mr. Klein. I should say for the record, Mr. Chairman,

that our committee has seen these files, but has never seen

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any reports

indicating that any kind of study was made to

compare these people to Oswald.

Were the results of these studies put in the final report

that you people -- that the Soviet Russia division published

in I believe February of 1977?

Mr. Bagley. No. The Soviet Russia -- may I speak about

that report?

The report, the so-called final Soviet Russia

division report has also been misrepresented here. What was

being done in the so-called thousand page report, or whatever

one chooses to call it, was

to make sense out of an incredible

mass of material.

It had gotten to the point, there were so many inter-

related cases, so much detail connected with Nosenko, that

somebody new coming into the case could probably no longer

master it. What I sought to do was to get each and every

aspect of the case written up, what Nosenko had said, what

investigations had been made of it, perhaps even comments on

it, or further things to be done on it.

That I don't remember -- the exact format. But I do know

the first two things were there, what Nosenko had said and

what our investigation, independent knowledge showed.

This was put together with the idea of being a reference

of easy access, not as a final report.

Now, exactly what was finally said in it when it got into

its eventual form, the so-called 400 page report, I don't

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know because I wasn't there, and I had certainly not originally

intended that compilation had to be a final report.

It has certainly been treated as such, and has been

described as such here. Perhaps there were passages in it

which had the kind of conclusions which I saw quoted --

Nosenko was not this, and was not that, and was trying to

deceive, and things of that sort.

Perhaps they appeared even in that thousand page report.

But frankly, that wasn't its original intent, and I don't

remember their being in there.

Mr. Klein. Do you specifically remember a report where

there was a study of all American defectors to the Soviet

Union and a

comparison?

Mr. Bagley. No, but I can assure you that the person to

ask on that would be the counterintelligence staff. That was

their responsibility.

Mr. Klein. You don't recall a report?

Mr. Bagley. No.

Mr. Klein. Do you recall any kind of effort to get hold

of documents, letters, diary written by Oswald, and compare

that to what Nosenko was telling you about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. No, no.

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Mr. Klein. When I asked you earlier about whether if

you thought that a more experienced person questioned Nosenko,

somebody who knew more about Oswald did the questioning, and

whether there were longer sessions, whether that might have

helped to get more information and get to the truth in this

matter, you said that you didn't think it would help. And in

your letter to us, you told us that you felt the Agency did an

adequate job, and you compared what the Agency learned about

Nosenko and what this committee learned and said that since we

and the FBI didn't learn any more than the CIA, that that shows

that the Agency did a good job.

Mr. Bagley. Did an adequate job. I didn't say did a

good job.

Mr. Klein. An adequate job.

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Klein. Did the FBI have the same access to Nosenko

that the CIA had?

Mr. Bagley. Yes. As I remember, I think he was delivered

to them. I think they probably questioned him -- I

am not

a hundred percent sure of this, but I seem to remember that

they questioned him on their own premises.. In other words,

I think he was

out of our custody in the period he was being

talked to by the FBI. It is conceivable that I am wrong and

that the FBI people came to the house in which Nosenko was

living and talked to him there. But I have some --

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the case.

Mr. Bagley. I'm sorry. I didn't remember.

Mr. Klein. Do you recall the FBI having any access to

Nosenko after April 4, 1964?

Mr. Bagley. No.

Nor do I remember their asking for such

access.

Mr. Klein. So they only were able to question Nosekno

for approximately two months in 1964, is that right?

Mr. Bagley. Correct.

Mr. Klein. And you stated in your letter that they

questioned him --

Mr. Bagley. Wait a minute. Excuse me. You said were

able to interrogate him only during two months?

Mr. Klein. They had two months --

Mr. Bagley. You used the words "were able". They were

able to talk to him more if they asked for it. I said that

earlier today.

Mr. Klein. Well, you are saying they could have spoken

to him after April 4, 1964.

Mr. Bagley.

Of course.

We would never have denied them

access to him.

Mr. Klein. And your testimony is that they had questioned

him all they wanted, and that is why they didn't question him

any more after April 4, 1964.

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Mr. Bagley. Yes. It is certainly my understanding.

Mr. Klein. Mr. Chairman, again I would like to read

from the report given to us by the FBI, from page 5. This

particular section was read into the record at our earlier

hearings. I would like to read it again.

"The FBI had no direct access to Nosenko from April 3, 1964

until April 3 of 1969, and therefore was not in a position to

make an objective assessment of his bona fides nor of the ver-

acity of information furniehed by him. Thus information

provided by him in early 1964 was accepted at face value and

qualified in terms of the source and the conditions under which

it was; received."

Does that indicate to you that the FBI felt that they

could have interviewed him any time they wanted after April 4,

1964?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

The phrase in there was they had, as

I understood it -- they had no access to him during that

period. They didn't suggest, I think, by that phraseology that

they were denied it. I know of no case in which the FBI

asked for access to Nosenko or that anything was said to

the Bureau that suggested to them that they could not have

access to him during his period of detention.

Mr. Klein. And you also compared the findings of the

CIA with the findings of this committee. Do you think the

fact that this committee spoke to

Nosenko fourteen years

later

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might have put the committee at a disadvantage versus the

position the CIA was in in 1964?

Mr. Bagley. Normally I would say of course. In this

case, I see no sign of it.

Mr. Klein. You don't think that the committee had any

disadvantage --

Mr. Bagley. No.

I say I don't see any sign of it in

the result. On the contrary, I think you got everything and

perhaps a bit more. As to whether the four years make a

disadvantage in this case or not, I would say normally of

course it would. Everybody's memory fades, especially of

experienced events.

Mr. Klein. Do you think that the absence of the

investigative and intelligence resources that the CIA had

available in 1964, the absence of that for this committee

might have also made it more difficult for this committee to

conduct its investigation?

Mr. Bagley. The absence of what -- excuse me?

Mr. Klein. The investigative and intelligence

resources that the CIA has available, and had available in

1964, that that might have --

Mr. Bagley. As I pointed out to you, there were no

investigative resources that you would consider serious ones

inside the Soviet Union.

Mr. Klein. You don't think that the. CIA had any

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advantage over this committee as far as sources available to

them?

• Mr. Bagley. I don't know what your limitations were,

Mr. Klein. I would think that the type of sources that

I have described would have been made available to your

committee had you asked them. In other words, defectors,

available background information on the Soviet Union and

so forth. I don't think that -- well, I don't know what other

assets you are talking about or what other capabilities.

Mr. Klein. You state in your letter that the committee

came up with only one fact.

Mr. Bagley. Well, I was talking there about the --

Mr. Klein. Surveillance.

Mr. Bagley. The surveillance.

Mr. Klein. You are aware that the committee came up

with numerous inconsistencies in Nosenko's statements?

Mr. Bagley. I certainly am. And I found them extremely

well presented.

Mr. Klein. In the time that the CIA had to question

Nosenko, can you specifically tell us any inconsistencies

or untruths that the CIA pinned him to?

Mr. Bagley. In the details of the case?

Mr. Klein. Yes

Mr. Bagley.: The answer is probably no. I don!t --

and the answer is certainly no, I do not remember any.

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But as to whether there were or not, I don't remember.

Mr. Klein. In the files that I have read I can state

that I have not found any. And my question to you is if the

Agency did an adequate job, then how is it that fourteen years

later this committee found inconsistencies, when the Agency

never found any at the time?

Mr. Bagley. Well, some of those were changes in the story

in the interim, aren't they?

Mr. Klein. That is correct. But they came about

from questioning, from checking prior statements, questioning

a number of times about the facts, twenty-five, thirty hours.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, prior statements.

Mr. Klein: My question basically is did the Agency

put the time and resources into this so that if there were

inconsistencies that could have been found in 1964 they would

have been found.

Mr. Bagley. I am not sure that these inconsistencies

did exist at that time. And certainly I am not sure that a

questioning of him at that time would have produced these

inconsistencies. I have no way of knowing that.

Mr. Klein. I am not necessarily referring to these

particular inconsistencies. What I am suggesting is that

if inconsistencies develop in questioning of somebody now,

would it be a fair statement that adequate questioning in

1964, although maybe not developing these same inconsistencies,

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would hae probably developed other inconsistencies which could

have been investigated and could have been the basis for

even further questioning.

Mr. Bagley. I think that is unknowable. I don't know.

Mr. Fithian. On that point, if I may add, Mr. Klein --

your own professional judgment is that Nosenko is lying

about his knowledge of Oswald in Russia, or that he is

intentionally misrepresenting what he knows to be factual

about the KGB treatment of Oswald.

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Fithian. I mean those are the only two possibilities.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Fithian. And that was your conclusion at that time.

Mr. Bagley. The conclusion --

Mr. Fithian. Let me just ask you. You never would

have put your stamp of approval on Nosenko's bona fides, is

that correct?

Mr. Bagley. No one would put a stamp of approval on

somebody's bona fides except as the result of a careful and

considerable period of investigation; that is any defector.

Mr. Fithian. I understand that.

Mr. Bagley. And in his case it is suggested and has

been suggested to this committee that conclusions were

drawn prior to his -- first of all prior to his reappearance

in 1964, in other words, after the 1962 meetings, and

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subsequently during that period, before he was incarcerated,

if that is the word. The fact is that at all times in our

discussion, regardless of what might -- well, let me start

again. That at all times we left the door open to him, for

him to prove his bona fides. The key period in this, in my

opinion, was in that period of freedom, after his defection,

where he was treated like anyone else, and we tried to go

down and talk to him and so forth. And there were points

or questions in our minds which we tried to approach with

him during that period.

I would say that we went to the meetings in 1964

with a doubt in the back of our minds. But in no way planning

to handle the meetings in a different way than would have been.

Quite a lot was made by Mr. Hart about the duplicity

with which we talked about the settlement arrangements that

would be made with Mr. Nosenko when he came to the United

States. This has been the subject of some controversy since.

My memory tells me that we were not and could not have

been authorized to exercise duplicity as such. We were

offering him the type of

settlement which we would have

offered to that man had he established his bona fides. It

was not duplicity as such.

Now, if you say at the same time that fellow who is

promising

these things is also

the author of this paper over

here which says that we don't trust him, of that there are some

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odd things here which suggest he was a KGB plant, I would say

absolutely yes. But is that duplicity? Because the door was

always open for the establishment of his bona fides.

And as for the first hostile interrogation, when we

confronted him with these contradictions, I would say to you

that we probably suspected that he would not be able to clear

up these things. But we didn't do it. And there might

conceivably have been some innocent explanation of both

contradictions in his own story or oddities, all the things

that Mr. Hart of others have mentioned, that there was some --

he was perhaps a pathological liar or that he was boasting or

he had a very strange memory, a whole lot of things could have

come up.

But what we had done in the meantime is to do a lot

of investigation on the side, not only about Oswald, and that

we presented this outside information to him, asked him

questions about it, and found that he was inexplicably unable

to answer the questions.

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At what point has one concluded that this man -- in other

words, dismissed him as a source? I don't think we ever did.

I don't think we talked to him about Oswald until much later,

during the period we are talking about here. I don't think any

less effort was made than would have been made with a serious

defector. There were certainly more troubles in getting

details from him than from other defectors, but I think our

posture, face-to-face to him, probably was

not much different

than it would have been had we not had the suspicions in the

background. It's the word "conclusions" that bothers me. It's

the conclusion what he might have said had we not had these

preconceptions, as Mr. Hart put it.

Mr. Fithian. I was trying to get at a followup to Mr.

Klein's questions. Mainly inconsistencies occurred because

stories didn't match and so on, but I was trying to ascertain

whether or not in your judgment, since you did not believe him,

you had reason at that time either because of inconsistencies on

lies or whatever you judged them to be, to disbelieve his

rendition of the Oswald story in Russia.

Mr. Bagley. To the degree we had a suspicion of him at

all, the answer is yes; we had that much reason to disbelieve.

what he said about Oswald in Russia. Plus the fact the story he

was telling about Oswald in Russia was absolutely unacceptable

to us alone as a story, for

all the reasons we have already

discussed. It was an incredible story and Mr. Hart and others

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have stressed that and every Soviet defector has stressed this.

Mr. Preyer. I have to be at a meeting over at the Capitol

at 12:45. If you want to continue some questioning, could you

come back? I suggest if it's agreeable with everyone that we

recess until 2 o'clock today. in this room and we can post a

notice on the door if we have to go to another room.

The committee stands in recess.

(Whereupon, at 11:40 a.m., the hearing was recessed, to

resume at 2 p.m., this same day.)

HH

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AFTERNOON SESSION

(2:10 p.m.)

Mr. Preyer. The committee will resume its sitting.

The Chair recognizes Mr. Klein to complete his questions.

Mr. Klein. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be exceedingly

brief, with only one question.

Mr. Bagley, to your knowledge is there any documentation,

reports, memos, that fully describe the efforts made by the CIA

in 1964, 165, '66, '67, to investigate what Nosenko had to say

about Oswald?

Mr. Bagley. No, and I would say as of 1966 or '67, when I

cut off, my best guess is that such a document doesn't exist.

I don't remember marking one and I am not quite certain what

the reason for making one would be.

Mr. Klein.. Is it normal procedure that during the course

of the investigation you wouldn't document the course of the

investigation?

Mr. Bagley. You would document everything you do, but you

certainly need not go back and describe everything you did or

everything you propose to do. I don't know who such a document

would be directed to, for example. If one were reporting

progress of an investigation there would be reports of what was

done

and what not.. But this was one aspect of one larger

investigation and I can't remember any document being made up on

the subject.

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Mr. Kline. Thank you. I have no further questions.

Mr. Preyer. Mr. Fithian.

Mr. Fithian. Thank you, Judge.

My first question is less specific. We'll have more spe-

cific ones later.. But I have always been puzzled since Mr. Hart

appeared before us as

to why the Director would accept a man

who would testify in such a way as to create smashing anti-CIA

headlines out of that testimony and that goes beyond what you

said this morning as to his own personal knowledge or creden-

tials for making such testimony. Can you shed any light on that

at all?

Mr. Bagley. It goes without saying, I have thought about

this a lot. I think the dates of the Director's takeover of the

agency may have something to do with it. He came in from out-

side, very much outside, and he was faced with what to him was

probably repulsive or abominable state of affairs and he turns

to what was then the recognized expert, the man who had just

before his takeover of the agency conducted this study. I have

not seen it; I understand it's bulky and have no doubt as to its

conclusion. But I would say from the Director's point of view,

this man might appear to be the expert even though he was

already retired at the time he did the 1976 study.

Mr. Fithian. Going back to Mr. Hart's testimony on page

114 of our record, he says to this committee explaining how he

would proceed, he says: "Therefore, what I have before me are a

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series of notes which were finished about 8 o'clock last night

based on guidance which I got at that time from Admiral Stans-

field Turner, Director of the CIA."

Mr. Bagley. I am mystified and have been asked the ques -

tion and have

asked others the question and no one I know in the

Agency during my time or

since has come up with any sensible

explanation.

Mr. Fithian. Your assessment or judgment as to why Mr.

Hart was selected then stems from and concurs with what Mr.

Hart is saying a little later in his testimony when he says

since Admiral Turner has become Director of Central Intelligence

he has been quite concerned about this case and he specifically

requested I come back to the Agency from which

I retired in '72

and give presentations to agents on the nature of the case.

Now my question is this, since the Nosenko case became a

celebrated one long before this committee became interested or

long before we even knew he existed, was Mr. Hart's operation

such that he would be the logical person within the Agency or

immediately retired from the Agency to make the kind of presenta-

tions to "senior officials or

agents in the case" that we might

have expected?

Mr. Bagley. No, sir, he was not.

Mr. Fithian. May I reiterate in the record at this point

what Mr. Dodd so ably did during the questioning that day, and

that is to say that kind of testimony didn't in any way square

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with what this committee had requested of the Agency. We had

submitted to the Agency a very detailed list of questions or

concerns we had, Mr. Klein can amplify that, of all our concerns.

Then they were sent over to the Agency for a representative to

discuss these matters. I might state, in no way did the

Department comply with the request. It's worse than I thought

in this sense. We were very surprised that day that the subject

of Oswald was not discussed after some 30 or 40 minutes of

testimony and then all the questions and even the statement that

he was not qualified to comment on Oswald, which happens to be

the only thing this committee was primarily interested in.

So

I make that comment at this point in the record.

Now, let me turn to your specific testiomony, Mr. Bagley,

and ask you to refer to page 10 of your testimony.

Prior to asking a question as to this particular page, let

ne ask a couple of background questions: as a professional in

this field, I believe I read into your statement here that it is

highly unlikely, perhaps totally impropable, that someone with

Oswald's particular background would have been able to move in,

do the things he did in the Soviet Union, and move out without

being questioned by the KGB.

Mr. Bagley. That is absolutely my thought. I would say

it's absolutely unthinkable and it's unthinkable for the Soviet

defectors I know, it's unthinkable for anyone who knows the

automatic procedures of the Soviet Union, there is no way he

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could have evaded this action.

One described to me that the KGByas it would face an

American swimming into their sea, it would be like a pool of

piranhas, insofar as one could make a statement as dogmatic and

final as that. I would say it can't have happened as described.

Mr. Fithian. Well, then, when Mr. Nosenko told you, told

the Agency that story, that would have been as early as Geneva?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Fithian. Just prima facie, doesn't this raise ques-

tions on the part of the Agency as to credibility of this man at

all? I mean, even at the very outset, the first or second con-

tact you had with him in Geneva?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Fithian. Now, staying with the Geneva scene for just a

minute, this is a digression, but I was appalled at statements

made to us somewhere along the

way, Mr. Chairman, as to the

techniques of questioning Nosenko in Geneva, that the CIA non-

Russian-language person doing the recording and -- I have for-

gotten all the details. I would like some amplification, because

I occasionally vote on budgets around here.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir. A slight correction of dates and

the manner in which I entered into this case.

I was in fact stationed in Switzerland, not in headquarters

In the Soviet Division at the time this case broke. Therefore,

I came into it, if you like, as the Soviet operations expert in

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that area.

While I had given myself in the course of my career a lot

of home learning of Russian to the point where I occasionally

served as a low-level translator for the Ambassador or inter-

preter in some of his contacts with the Soviet Embassy, I was

most definitely never fluent or competent in the language.

But on the other hand, this

shouldn't keep one from operating

against the Soviet Union.

The contact made by a member of a Soviet delegation to that

area, in this instance a disarmament conference in Geneva, he

says "I want a contact with American intelligence," so somebody

had to do that. We was quite clear I was the person to contact

I

and tre did.

In the course of the first meeting with him, both English

and Russian were spoken. I told the man from the outset that I

would appreciate his speaking clearly and relatively slowly and

I would like to break into English whenever possible, and we

tried to reach a language of understanding. At times either

from excitement, impatience or whatever, he expressed himself

over a considerable number of sentences, fast, in Russian,

where

understanding of it was imperfect.

Now, I think at this late date, I told you this at a much

earlier date, but very early along our questioning of the man

and of our writing reports on him, *

•we were aware of those

points where he had said something and I had failed to

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understand simply because there were taped recordings of these

meetings.

During the second meeting -- it possibly could have been

the third but I think it was the second -- there was present in

the room a native-speaking Russian officer to accompany me in my

dealings with this man.

Although I came into it as a member of the Switzerland

component of the Agency, I was already known as particularly

competent and experienced in this field, so it was considered as

I think Mr. Helms said in 1964, it was considered a good face

for the Agency, a competent qualified face for this extremely

valuable source.

But from the second meeting on -- even in the first meeting,

a

mis

there were few understandings which consisted, I believe, of my

taking notes on certain things he said about his background.. The

military school which he attended was cited in your testimony

and there were one of two other minor things having to do with

the manner of his father's death. I made a mistake, I heard it

wrong. So, in my initial report to headquarters there were

mistakes. But at least for most of that first meeting I had no

doubt there was good understanding and for all subsequent

neetings, there was a total understanding.

To take misunderstandings which may have appeared in the

first cable and first meeting on insignificant matters and

extend them into a judgment as to the manner in which this

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source was handled from beginning to end is confusing, it mis-

leads you and is unnecessary and has no relevancy at all.

I want to say the so-called drunkenness, the heartfelt

Donn

statement of Mr. Nosenko to Mr. Hart, "2b, I was snookered,"

he wasn't snookered, he probably had a lot of booze, but he

was entirely lucid at all times. There was never a time when

communications were broken because of the influence of alcohol.

Therefore, I suggest that element of language misunder-

standing that you are speaking of and the element of drinking was

artificially introduced as an explanation and excuse for other

irregularities in Mr. Nosenko's reporting.

Mr. Fithian. Are you then saying that Nosenko used his

drinking to make up or cover up or disguise the fact he did not

know answers to certain questions of the account of that is

erroneous?

Yes

Mr. Bagley. Later when confronted with that in Geneva in

1962, he simply said, "I was drunk" or "I did not say that," or

"There was a misunderstanding."

In one case, Mr. Fithian, a very important case, he

described in 1962, his participation in an operation involving

an American of which we had a record. In 1964, he denied any

knowledge of that operation at all. It wasn't a question of a

transcript being ineptly made by some process I don't under-

stand, was not the transcript at all which entered into this

confrontation, we brought back a tape. This tape was loud and

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clear.

said, "You don't remember this operation? Here is

your voice."

..And he hears his voice loud and clear, giving de-

tails of the operation. And his explanation was that he was

drunk; he had no knolwedge of having spoken to it a year and a

half earlier. It's my premise that drunkenness doesn't give you

second sight.

Mr. Fithian. I think Nosenko used the term as to Oswald

being an "uninteresting target." Mr. Epstein in his book

perhaps makes a little too much of Oswald's potential knowledge

of the U-2. Am I off base on that?

пот

Mr. Bagley. I think

It makes a good story. It's

logical, but after all, this is something which escaped American

attention. I have had an American friend who has come to me

since then and said, "You can't expect me to believe the security

review of Oswald failed to pick up the fact he knew about the

U-2."' I don't think it's even been proven he knew about the U-2

and I think it's the sort of thing that would have slipped by

in any instance. He was at a Marine radar base 500 meters

from

where the U-2 took off,

and his radar unit tracked it. Possibly

certain things as to speed and altitude might have come to

Oswald's attention.

For example, Mr. Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union

would have been a part of naval intelligence to see what he knew

or didn't know; and I have a hunch the most conscientious

investigation you could make about that man might not bring up

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the fact that his service in that radar shack was in any way

related to a highly secret operation which was documented in

totally different ways.

I do agree with you that it's unlikely that the U-2 was the

special information that Nosenko -- excuse me, that Oswald told

Snider. There has been a lot of speculation as to the informa-

tion of special interest he had. It may be he realized there

was a special operation and this was the special thing he had to

offer to the Soviets, but it's certainly not provable.

Mr. Fithian. One of the central questions which may go

unanswered, but I would appreciate your best guess, I am not

sure fron your testimony whether you believe that Nosenko came

to the United States, became available as a defector -- I

conclude you believe him to be a plant. I am not sure as to

what your real belief is as to why he might have become the

plant. Some very wrapped-up in the assassination would have us

believe this was of such tremendous potential disturbing nature

for Soviet-American relations

that even if Oswald didn't have

that much of a role to play with the KGB, they would defuse

anything that had to do with Oswald before they sent him over

here. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to send someone of

Nosenko's caliber.

The other possibility is the one I think you alluded to,

that is, they believed the kind of information Agent "X" was

giving was of such a potential damaging nature, that they should

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muddy the water and send a plant calling attention to what he

was testifying to.

You call it on page 14, a "crude message." I take it from

that you have no definitive information. But I would like to

know what your guess is.

Mr. Bagley. It would be a pleasure to say.

It seems to be difficult for Mr. Hart or for anybody coming

into this case to make distinctions; and one of the big distinc-

tions is: between his contact in Geneva in '62 and his recon-

tacts in coming out in '64 saying he was going to defect.

In 1962, he made it absolutely clear to us that he would

never defect, under no circumstances. He had his family, he

liked living in the Soviet Union, but he had certain undefined

objections to the Soviet regime. I was reminded in Mr. Hart'

testimony, I think that he needed some money urgently and

therefore he was coming to us. He not only said he wouldn't

defect but he wouldn't accept contact with us inside the Soviet

Union. However he would see us whenever he came out on official

duty on Soviet delegations abroad.

In January of '64 he came out and stupefied us with this

statement that now he wants to defect. I can assure you my

first question was, "Why? Didn't you tell us you never would?"

His answers were extremely vague. "Well, I think they may

suspect me. I have decided to make a new life."

I asked, "How about your family?" He said well, he had

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decided to start anew and they would be all right.

Now, I detect in that a tremendous change of course.

Therefore, I would like to answer your question as to what he

might have been about in '62 and '64.

In '62 I say in my letter and testimony he was deflecting

information given 6 months before by Defector "X." This was

clear.

There were such connections, there was an astonishing

overlap. I have dealt with many Soviet-bloc intelligence

officers and of course many would know two or three doing the

same thing. But the degree his information coincided to certain

information given to us by "X" was simply not unacceptable, but

it was noteworthy.

I would guess on that basis, Mr. Fithian, that the purpose

in 1962 was that this man was sent out to do a perfectly under-

standable counterespionage technique. The question has been

asked why the tremendous change between 1962 and 1964. His

reasons make no sense. They are not convincing. So what is it

in the Soviet mind that would cause a man to physically send a

man out when they said they never would?

By way of footnote, I would like to say I mentioned in my

testimony the insight we got into this man is that he hadn't in

fact held the positions he

said he had held. Not only was he

not a plant but he was not a real KGB officer. The reason we

have what we have in this tremendous volume of information is

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that we have that detention and we were able to take it. We

had him sitting -- he tried to avoid him sitting down but once

we had him sitting down, we could see he did not know about the

operations of his colleagues, he did not know about his main

target, he did not know those things.

But still in '62, had he come out to see us in Copenhagen,

New York or Buenos Aires, he could have seen us only for an

hour here or there under tense circumstances where there would

be no chance to get into details under the controlled conditions

I am speaking of.

Therefore I think the Soviets had a good thing going had

they left the man where he was. But as a defector they were

running a big risk. This is not going away from your question,

because it involves the decision to do this, to change the

course. This is all assuming under your category we are

speculating that he is a KGB plant.

Something made them want us to have him in hand as a

defector. One of the possibilities could be the event which

happened in the interim, the assassination of President Kennedy,

and therefore he was as you say, used for this message because

he may have been the only valid, controlled and trusted secret

contact to CIA.

The Soviets have shown a proclivity to use tricky methods

like this. to give us messages through clandestine means going

directly to the President, escaping suspicious desk officers.

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But it's possible they looked for a way to get a message of

their innocence as. to President Kennedy's assassination.

If it was the best available channel, I can see the non-KGB or

let us say a member of the Soviet leadership, like Mr. Khrush-

chev hinself, may have said do it, and the professional might

have said, yes, but the fellow might run into trouble, and the

reply would be yes, but do it.

This is again in the realm of speculation.

I only know of one other -- by way of background -- I only

know of one potential explanation of this man coming out to see

us in short stretches of the man putting himself into our hands

as a defector.

Mills

fls

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That has to do with an unrelated matter. It is very

difficult -- it is even more speculative than is related to

the Kennedy assassination.

In other words, I am not at all sure that the other spec-

ulation is any more valid than what I have just said.

So, I would say that in groping for an explanation on

the basis of the hypothesis that he is a sent KGB agent, one

of the two things, one of the only two that I can think of,

is that he was sent to give a message to the Warren Commission.

Mr. Fithian. In that 1962 interview, is there any

reference made to Nosenko's alleged role in recruiting American

tourists?

Mr. Bagley. Yes. He said that at that time he had made

his career from 1955 until 19 -- until the end of 1959 in

the tourist department, and he spoke about it at that time.

In 1962 he had just gone back, after a two-year period in

the section working against the American Embassy in Moscow,

he had gone back to that section, working against tourists,

with a promotion.

So, needless to say he did talk about operations against

tourists.

Mr. Fithian. Was there in that interview, in 1962,

anything which tends to support his later claims of his

position within the KGB?

Mr. Bagley. Prior to his contact with us in 1962, he

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claims to have made a brilliant career as an English-speaking

case officer, an operations officer, a man who gets out in the

field, a tough guy, as he used to call himself.

He told of certain things he had done. We checked them

out. It goes without saying we were fairly meticulous about

that. We found only two operations in which he physically

appeared at all prior to 1962, that we could confirm.

In other words, we were getting from him the statement of

where he was, and then we were going back to what we knew about

those operations, or else going out and interviewing the

people involved.

One was as a member of a team of about three, three

people in the compromise of an American tourist on homo-

sexual grounds in 1956.

The other was as a junior officer, a companion of an

identified officer, senior officer, of the Tourist Department

of the KGB in meeting with an agent of theirs whom the

bureau had interviewed. That agent's testimony -- I will say

he was an American -- this American's testimony showed that

Nosenko appeared exclusively as a junior member of the

team. He had never appeared alone.

The other man, who was an identified officer of the

section, of the tourist directed section, did all the question-

ing and all the control of the meetings as testified by the

agent.

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111

Now, one of the interesting things about that particular

case is those meetings with Nosenko playing a junior role

continued well into 1960, at a time when Mr. Nosenko said later

that he had shifted into the section working against the

American Embassy in Moscow.

Mr. Fithian. And held an important position in it.

Mr. Bagley. The Deputy Chief of it.

Mr. Fithian. And you are saying that according to Soviet

structure, that would be highly improbable?

Mr. Bagley. Very. I can't imagine why the Deputy Chief

of a section busy working against the American Embassy should

accompany a senior Tourist Department officer in meeting an

agent who, while admittedly American, a resident -- from

time

to time a resident in Moscow -- but primarily directed to

tourist-oriented operations, why he should continue in that

capacity.

If we were the senior case officer and had a special

relationship withthe man

•would be acceptable, quite, no

reason why not.

They might feel no one else could do it as well, and

maybe this man had some potential to talk about members of

the American Embassy. I believe by the way that that is the

way that Nosenko explained it when we asked him about this.

He knew people in the Embassy, but that doesn't really

check with the story as given by the man himself when

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interviewed by the FBI.

Mr. Fithian. Do you have any information on the treat-

ment of Nosenko's family in Russia after his defection?

Mr. Bagley. There was a story, as unlikely as the story

I mentioned in my testimony, of Mr. Epstein's being told by

an official member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington that

Nosenko is the best qualified man in the United States, the

best qualified man in the world really to talk about Oswald

in Russia.

That other story has to do -- let me see -- with the

approach by a Soviet official to a large circulation magazine,

in this case Paris Match, offering

a story to them, illustrated

by pictures,

a story of the pathos of the family of

Yuri

Nosenko, Colonel Nosenko, I believe is one of the many people

who referred to Nosenko as a Colonel, having left his family

behind, and how this would turn into -- there would be a

divorce, and these children were left behind.

He offered, by way of illustration of this heart-

rendering article, apicture of two daughters, I think, as I

remember -- I think we got a hold of them -- on a

boat in a

lake somewhere, I suppose in Moscow.

In other words, here was a Soviet official coming and

saying here is the family. In other words, they were talking

about the family. For the first time in our experience,

after a defection, the wife and mother of the defector came

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to the American Embassy to plead with the Embassy to, I

don't know, give their son back of something, I don't know.

There had been at that time no precedent. I believe since

then there have been one or two similar cases where the family

has done this, but I can assure you that no family of any

defector is going to be free to go to the American Embassy

in Moscow, unless the KGB wants it that way.

So, I find the whole family business, from what we know

about the family after the defection, very strange.

As to their faith, I don't think we do know.. At least

not at the time I left the operation, I don't think we had

any really firm information about whether they had suffered

or whether they just had gone ahead with a divorce. I am told,

by the way, by some sources, that if

a man defects, he becomes

automatically an enemy of the state and a divorce is granted

automatically.

I was told unofficially somewhere in between, after I had

left the case, that, if memory serves me, that a divorce had

gone through in the Soviet Union.

Now, how that is known, I have no idea. Perhaps through

Nosenko, perhaps he was notified in some way.

Mr. Fithian. I wanted to turn to what seems to me to be

kind of a curious situation. I refer to the questions that

you say you submitted to the FBI.

Just glancing over them, there seems to be several

questions in which the CIA would have just been vitally

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interested in -- how the KGB works against American tourists,

for example, any techniques, any process, any procedure or

whatever.

I don't know, Mr. Klein, I have not reviewed the

interviews of the 23rd and the 27th -- I have not had them

available to me, so I may just be covering ground that you

have already covered.

If that is so, Judge, we could save this time.

But in the second question listed, the second set of

questions that you gave to the FBI, among others in that

section was "Describe the routine handling procedure of U.S.

tourists to the Soviet Union. Was Oswald's trip handled any

differently?"

You alluded earlier this morning to the fact that you

were always trying to update your files on procedures.

It

seems to me that you had

a potential, at least, a superb

opportunity, a person who had worked in this sensitive area,

right in the area of one of the important procedures as far

as we would be concerned, and that is safeguarding American

tourists from being somehow enticed

away to become defectors

and so on.

Am I to believe that you submitted these to the FBI,

the FBI did or did not use them, you are not sure, and then

subsequently you never really returned to this?

Mr. Bagley. No. I don't know

how it got included in the

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questions for the FBI for Nosenko because it involves the

handling of tourists. We did a very, very systematic debrief-

ing of Mr. Nosenko on the subject of the KGB's handling of

American and other tourists in the Soviet Union. I must say

that if I had to list the information which Nosenko has given,

which is valuable, that would be at the top of the list.

He had that. He gave it well. We got it out, and we

put it into forms which would serve the purposes that you

just mentioned, Mr. Fithian.

We circulated widely not only to those elements of the

United States Government, and even to the American public --

I think a version was put out into the public domain. But

to foreign liaison services, to our allies who themselves

could draw value from knowing the techniques of the KGB

control and actions against foreign tourists in the USSR.

Yes, indeed, we did that. Why it appears there, I don't

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know.

Mr. Fithian. Another is a question which seems logical

enough. If you worked so hard at trying to establish Nosenko's

authenticity, it would be likely that they would work equally

hard on establishing whether Oswald was bona fide or not.

Mr. Bagley. Much, much harder.

Mr. Fithian. Did you ever ask Nosenko?

Mr. Bagley. Of course.

Mr. Fithian. Those questions?

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Mr. Bagley. I can only say the answer is of course. I

don't know what the record shows, but there is no doubt that

we at some point showed some -- perhaps it was in the house --

but we must have indicated to Mr. Nosenko our disbelief in

this disinterest on the part of the KGB.

I don't know what the record shows on that, but it was

blatant. We were aware of it at the time. It seems almost

unthinkable to me that we didn't confront Nosenko with it

and ask for an explanation.

By the way, I would think that this is one of the many

times when he, I won't say clams up, but when he stubbornly

opposes

the line of questioning by simply repeating what he

said before; that is, that it is uninteresting, uninteresting -

at which a standard -- I am not sure this happened, I am

saying this is the way it would have gone -- we would have

said, "Well, that doesn't answer the question."

This was an American young ex-Marine coming into your

country. He would say, he is unstable. I am sure this was

his line of defense against this type of question -- that

this man was considered personally unstable, and uninteresting-

those words are used over and over again, I believe, in the

reports.

I think Mr. Klein knows the reports better than I do at

this point. But he emphasized that the act of suicide, or

attempted suicide, in the first place, showed that the man

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was unstable, and after that the psychiatric examinations

which either were or were not done more or less confirmed

this. To believe Mr. Nosenko, this suspended all their

procedures.

But that the question was asked to him, how is this

possible I have no doubt. It must have been.

Mr. Fithian. Do you happen to know, just from your own

knowledge of Russian operations, whether a person judged

unstable, an American who wanted to defect and so on, would

have been permitted under Russian law or procedures to marry

a Russian citizen?

Mr. Bagley. I don't know the answer to that question.

I don't know.

Mr. Fithian. Do you have any information at all on

Marina and any relationship that she had to the KGB in any

way, shape or form?

Mr. Bagley.

None whatsoever. On the contrary, he said

she was an uninteresting girl with no character, nothing.

I remember this response about Marina.

Mr. Fithian. You mean that is Nosenko's?

Mr. Bagley. Nosenko's response, as I remember. I am

surely not having a failure of memory here, but I know that he

must have addressed himself, and that we must have asked him

about Marina.

His reaction, I know, I remember his statement that she

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was of no interest. I think it may have been in connection

with why did they let her go. Well, she was of no value, no

interest, it didn't matter, dumb girl, something of that sort.

Mr. Fithian. Let me suspend at the moment. I may not

have any more questions. I thought I had one or two more as

I walked back over, Judge.

Mr. Preyer.

Well, I will ask a few, and maybe it will

refresh your recollection.

When you first brought Nosenko to this country, there

was a free period, as you described it, in which he was

treated like any other defector.

Some of the recent news stories, some of the treatment is

quite free indeed, I notice.

But you indicated that he resisted normal questioning

during the free period. That resistance was more in terms of

simply evading your questions? He was not physically trying

to evade you? '

Mr. Bagley.. No, no, no, no. It was in terms of

evading the questions.

Mr. Preyer. But you felt he wasn't responding the way

a normal defector during that free period might respond, in

the openness with which he would answer questions?

Mr. Bagley. Absolutely.

Mr. Preyer. Then you went into a period of controlled

questioning. He was first confined to a safe house, I

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gather, somewhere in the general area here.

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Preyer.

When was he no longer allowed to use

alcohol? Or was there ever any period in which he was never

allowed to use alcohol?

Mr. Bagley. I would say the entier period of detention.

There was never any question of his having any alcohol from

the 4th of April onward.

Mr. Preyer. So as soon as he went from the free period

of questioning to the safe house, controlled period, all

alcohol was barred from that time on?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Preyer. On the questionof hallucinations, I think

you indicated that he did not suffer from any hallucinations

from alcohol. Did he ever have any periods in which he

hallucinated, to your knowledge?

Mr. Bagley. This is a debated question. You may remember-

in the periods when he was alone, not being questioned, he

sometimes spoke to himself, and he would tell his guards that,

"I see something." That is as I remember the form the

hallucinations took.

We were both concerned and interested in it. The doctor

went to him. He maintained he was hallucinating. This was,

believe, a very limited period. It has been made out as if

this took place during periods when he was in face-to-face

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contact with someone in answering questions.

It isn't true. It was strictly noted by the guards and

Nosenko himself saying this to them. The doctor, who is a

trained psychiatrist, his opinion was that these hallucinations

were feigned. I am certainly not qualified to say whether

they were or not..

So, the answer to your question is I don't know whether

he was actually hallucinating or not. I do know that it had

nothing whatsoever at any time to do with the question sessions.

It had no impact on his answers to any questions that he was

ever asked.

Mr. Preyer. Well, once controlled questioning began, you

have described it as somewhat spartan conditions. I think you

have helped restore some balance to this nature of that

questioning and confinement.

Now, you mentioned on the diet, your comments on that I

gather was that there was a deliberate effort to put him on

a lean diet, but that that was checked with a doctor.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Preyer. At regular intervals?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Preyer. How often did you see Nosenko yourself once

he got into a controlled period of questioning?

Mr. Bagley. Frequently, during the first period of hostile

interrogation. I believe that is all. I participated from

the wings in subsequent questioning, but not directly face-to-

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face with Nosenko.

Mr. Preyer. During the first period, the safe house

period, would you see him once a week of once a month?

Mr. Bagley. Oh, no. I spoke about the hostile interro-

gation. That was daily. That was for the period it lasted. I

actually can't remember whether that was a matter of a week or

two weeks. It wasn't long. It was a very short period.

Then I saw him very frequently indeed at the other side

of the table.

Mr. Preyer. Well, when he went into what has been

described as the bank vault period of questioning, was that

the period when you did not see him very often?

Mr. Bagley. Well, yes, I did not see him during the bank

vault period at all. I did not see him after the first

hostile interrogation. I did not see him face-to-face even

in the first holding area.

In other words, during this summer questioning, the ques-

tioning that followed the hostile interrogation, and during

the second hostile interrogation, I did not see him. I saw

him no more after the month of April 1964.

Mr. Preyer. Well, under whose direct control was he at

thattime, afteryou no longer saw him face-to-face?

Mr. Bagley. Mine. Your question was whether. I saw

him face-to-face.

Mr. Preyer.

Yes.

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Mr. Bagley. But direct control, I would say, in the

sense of responsibility for the interrogation and for the

handling of the case --

Mr. Preyer. These are all people in your division who

were seeing him and questioning him daily.

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir.

Mr. Preyer. What relation is Mr. Engleton to your

division?

Mr. Bagley. They are entirely separate. Mr. Pingleton's

counterintelligence staff has a staff role as against an

operational or executive role. The Soviet division was the

organization within the agency specifically operating

against the USSR and the satellites.

We would run the cases, handle the defectors, plan and

carry out, sometimes through people who were not members of the

Soviet

division, of course, in the stations

abroad.

Mr. Preyer. Did Mr. (ingleton ever see him face-to-face

during this period?

Mr. Bagley. No, sir. Mr. Engleton's role was as the

overall agency, the seat of agency expertise in counter-

intelligence in general. He kept an eye on these things,

and

he would have an advisory role.

In this particular case, his role was conditioned by the

fact that his staff was managing the earlier defector, X.

Mr. Preyer. Were you aware of the two lie detector tests

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tests that were given to him?

Mr. Bagley. Yes,

sir.

Mr. Preyer.

Was it two or three?

Mr. Bagley. I think three.

Mr. Preyer.

Three?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, sir. Indeed, I was aware of them.

Mr. Preyer. Is it accurate that they were given to him

with the understanding that he would be told he failed the

test whether he did or not?

Mr. Bagley. After the test, yes. That is true. The

first test given, at the time of his confinement, but before

he was told he was going to be confined, he was simply taken

and given the test.

Now, Mr. Hart has said that here was already an

extraneous element added, that somebody, instead of putting

on the normal three controls of palm moisture and blood

pressure and heart beat, that an additional thing, something

to increase his tension, was put on him to allegedly be

capable of measuring brain waves.

I don't remember that. It is possible. If he has the

record that it was done, fine, but I thought that the first

lie detector test was given straight, and there was indeed,

sit, the intent to tell him that he had failed it, as the

means of opening the hostile interrogation, which would

confront him with all the collected contradictions in his

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story and the data from outside his story which indicated that

he wasn't what he said he was.

Mr. Preyer. You mentioned somewhere in your testimony

about the word "disposal" being political jargon, CIA

jargon. Disposal does not necessarily mean liquidation in

the jargon, or does it?

Mr. Bagley. No, sir. I have never heard of the word

disposal being used for liquidation. I would like to just add

one -- as long as the subject comes up once more -- I would

really like to say one more thing about liquidation.

I remember some years ago Mr. Helms saying that not only

would there be no assassination, murder. liquidation, any

kind of what this

action which has been in the jargon called

executive action, not only would there not be any, but there

would not be any discussions or proposals, it would not be a

subject fit for human ears within the agency.

I have lived my time in the agency under that belief.

Like many other officers of the agency were surprised when

the publicity came out about someone had contemplated, one or

two or three of these political assassinations, they were

counter to what I thought was the very specific, explicit

policy of the agency.

It was unthinkable that anyone could therefore have

thought of disposal in those terms.

Mr. Preyer. Well, the question of disposal in the sense

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of resolving this issue in some way must have certainly

occurred from -- at increasingly frequent intervals, I would

think -- where you have a man in this controlled custody for

some five years and where it became, was beginning to become

clear that you were not going to get much one way of the other

from him.

Which gets back to the question of what you referred to

as the duped leadership, and the idea that a small handful of

you were aware of this, were aware of his treatment, but that

no one else was really very aware of what was going on.

Would you make periodic reports to somebody from time

to time of the progress or lack of progress that was being

made?

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Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes, yes, indeed.

First of all, who knew about it is the first thing --

the small group we are talking about consisted of everyone on

that particular case, that operation, everyone responsible.

In other words, for the interrogation of Nosenko and the

investigation of his leads, and the use of his information

for whatever purpose within our agency, which meant primarily

certain elements of the Soviet division, Soviet bloc division.

It involved the counterintelligence staff,

as I mentioned,

because of their advisory function in counterintelligence

matters. In that case it meant the chief of staff and those

members that he delegated to be aware of this, and there were

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several.

It meant the Office of the Chief of the Clandestine

Services, known then as the Deputy Director for Plans, and

since changed to the Deputy Director for Operations, I believe,

the DDO, his office and the assistant DDO office, DDP, at that

time -- the assistant DDP's office, and those members of

that office who needed to cope with the paper.

On upward to the office of the, I guess -- my dates may be

a little fuzzy -- but I think the then Deputy Director of the

agency, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Mr.

Helms .

It goes without saying if we are sending the doctor out

to check him next week, of if we are planning to interrogate

him on a certain subject, or if we are talking about making --

giving him or not giving him books to read, or things like that,

that we would never go to Mr. Helms about that.

But if we were planning an interrogation session on a

certain subject, of planning something that was substantive,

or if a certain amount of time had passed, and it was just

time to check in, Mr. Helms was always

available, as I think

he has testified.

He was always available. Surely, as I read what he said,

I think what he said was a very accurate reflection of what

was really going on. In other words, he got some of it, but

by no means all of it.

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He wouldn't have known that the man was hot or cold. If

the man had been -- if that had been a matter of policy, to

make the man hot or cold, he most surely would have known

about it. But the various little aspects of this holding

certainly would not have been brought to his attention

routinely. They would have been brought to the attention of

whoever was concerned.

There was a lot of consultation in advance. There was a

lot of periodic consultation -- staff meetings, I suppose you

would call it -- on the subject. As you say, sir, there was

increasing concern as time went on because I felt that Mr.

Helms was always aware, (a) that what we were dong was legal

but, (b) that it became more and more sensitive as time went

on and this couldn't go on indefinitely.

He was as interested as he could be because he understood

the implications behind this operation, which were immense,

and they went way beyond Mr. Nosenko.. They went to several

other operations, several other Soviet intelligence people

who were in touch with us in one way or another.

The implication underlying it clearly pointed at serious

matters.

Not only that Mr. Oswald may have been a Soviet

agent, but also that there would be penetration in the U.S.

Government.

It followed logically as an implication of the fact that

Nosenko could have been sent -- and by the way, could have

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told us a false story about his career. I think that is a

very menacing little piece of information because if he can.lie

to us about a key job during a key period, it would suggest

to me that the KGB knows that we are unable to check on this,

which I find disturbing.

Mr. Preyer. Well, you categorically deny, then, any

implication that this was the treatment that Nosenko, and

was known to only a handful, five or six people in the agency,

and that they were deliberately -- I think this is at least an

implication from the testimony -- deliberately hiding it from

the upper echelon of the CIA for fear that the planted agent

might get wind of it.

Mr. Bagley. I certainly do categorically deny that.

There was -- it is fiction. Within the agency, it always

works.on the need to know, and some operations are kept tighter

than others.

But a defector in our hand, unfortunately by the

very nature of things, can't be very tightly held.

The number of people who knew about the case and generally

about what was going on were -- was appropriate. I would say

there were in our division alone, there must have been five or

six people directly talking to Nosenko. Plus those that were

supporting them at the desk, and plus the leadership of the

division, plus all these elements of the counterintelligence

staff.

We are talking about a multiple of the five or six you are

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speaking of. It was done as any such operation would be done

in the agency.

In other words, all who had any responsibility would

know about it. All who had any responsibility for that

particular line of work.

Mr. Preyer. This question might be an invasion of privacy.

If you don't want to answer it, don't answer it. I am just

curious as to your general political views -- whether you are

a liberal or conservative. I ask that because knowing some of

your relatives, and knowing their views, they are hardly what

would be known as hard line conservatives.

There has been some implication that this group controlling

Nosenko was a very hard line group. I don't know whether you

want to comment on what your political views are.

Mr. Bagley. Oh, yes, I would welcome that. Insofar as

the tradition,

family and otherwise, it certainly has been

liberal indeed.

My line of work has kept me apart from active political

life in the United States, so I haven't identified myself in

any way. But, I would certainly consider myself very strongly

middle of the road.

Then we come to the whole question of being anti-soviet or

not. To say that I am hard line anti-Soviet, anti-KGB,

anti- -- well, that is enough -- Soviet and KGB I most

assuredly am.

I think -- I make remarks here which I think

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even looking at them now seem fairly firm about what the KGB

is up to in terms of deception and subversion.

I have been exposed to the people who are doing it for

a very long time, and none of them has ever given any other

view of what the KGB is up to. That is just as much 1978

as 1962 or 1958 or 1952, before the death of Stalin. Nothing

has changed the basic thrust of the KGB's work against this

country.

I found it tremendously rewarding as a career to be able

to focus on what was very clearly the enemy of our country,

outside enemy of our country, rather than some of these

Third World things which have caused such, well, really

confusion in the motivations of some of the men that have had

to work with them.

I consider not that I would have been -- I might have

shared some of these feelings, and I might have taken -- might

have fallen on either side of the fence in those operations

where we were supporting a government or a political party

in certain Third World areas.

I don't know how I would have felt about it because I

didn't have to. So, I consider myself more lucky than anything

else to have avoided that. But certainly the group who were

exposed to KGB officers day in and day out, whether as

adversaries or as defectors, are extremely anti-Soviet.

I believe, by the way, that that permits me to be in

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American political terms a liberal.

Mr. Preyer. Yes, I think Mr. Moynihan and Ben Wattenberg

and a number of people of that sort would agree with you on

that.

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Did you ever talk to Mr. Epstein?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Preyer. About his book?

Mr. Bagley. Yes.

Mr. Epstein has made that clear

publicly and I think there are certain things in the book

which make that clear, too.

Mr. Epstein got from others the basic outlines of the.

Nosenko story, and then made an approach to me, and I of

course refused to talk to him.

Later he came back, a few months later, and with a long

letter telling me someof the things he knew, which were

things which I would never have thought could have gotten into

the public domain. At which point I did accept to see him and

he, without my saying a word, exposed exactly what he had and

what he was doing and showed me

what he was going to write,

which was in its broad lines the general story of the

Nosenko case and in its details full of confusion and

inaccuracies.

So, the primary help that I gave to Mr. Epstein on that

book was to insure that at least the errors were not in

there, and that this book, which was going to be the first

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time that the Nosenko story was going to become public, that

at least there would not be egregious errors. There are some

errors of emphasis which Mr. Fithian has pointed out, which I

happen to agree with. But that is entirely Mr. Epstein's

business, how he chooses

to interpret what he hears.

Several of the things are wrong, and I gather they have

even been accepted by the CIA. For example, Mr. Epstein

insisted that there was some sort of a cleansing, of purposeful

cleansing of the Soviet operations of the CIA, and people

like myself and the chief of the Soviet division were got

rid of.

I explained to him at the time, I said I didn't think

that should get into his book because that was incorrect.

I told him how I had gotten my assignment abroad, and how I

justified my leaving my headquarters position.

I happen to know the

way in which the chief of the

division got his overseas assignment. It had nothing to

do with any such plot.

I think in retrospect that we would have both done

better to stay here and be purged, if purging was in the mill.

In fact, it did, our assignments abroad did occur in the normal

course of events. Mr. Epstein put it different.

There are two of three things like that, interpretaions

which I most assuredly don't share. But the facts that Mr.

Epstein has in the book are generally accurate.

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Mr. Preyer. Thank you.

Mr. Fithian?

Mr. Fithian. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Bagley, do you think that the CIA did all it could to

cooperate with the Warren Commission?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, I do, because -- my exposure to it was

by the way a minor one. I think -- I know -- on one of these

occasions -- it hasn't emerged in the record, and perhaps it

will, but I thought I had actually gone over once with Mr.

Helms to the commission.

It was at a time when Mr. Helms was making a statement --.

when Mr. Helms was telling -- I think it is one of these

things that has come out in all this testimony. My exposure

to it was practically nil.: I don't know, but the impression

I get is that every effort within the agency, in every corner

of the agency was to dig out everything we could that could

possibly help the Warren Commission in its job.

I am absolutely. convinced of that. But I do stress that

I am not in a position to judge because it was the counter-

intelligence staff that centralized the activity and all. But

I know

that our people dug and dug and dug.

For example, in my section at the time, an officer went --

we thought what can we do, how can we use the files of the

CIA to contribute in any way. We decided to have a look at

the photograph file of the agency, whichis a rather extensive

thing, and see just what Minsk looked like, and what we could

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see, the places that were in Oswald's life, in Oswald's back-

ground.

It was a member of my section who dredged up, out of files

of the CIA, a tourist picture which showed Oswald in front of

I believe the opera house. It was one of those columned

buildings. There was a tourist group, and there was Oswald.

This fellow came up to me and said, look, I have been

looking through pictures of Minsk and doesn't this look funny

to you, and showed me this picture, and that was him.

That document, of course, is a part of the Warren

Commission report. In other words, we were doing everything

we could think of to do to help the Warren Commission.

Absolutely good faith.

Mr. Fithian. I am curious. At the very outset Nosenko

appears

to be a fraud -- that is pretty harsh, but I will let

it stand. Assuming that was your interpretation, assuming

you didn't get anything to persuade you that you were wrong,

isn't five years a long investment in somebody that you

thought was a fraud?

Mr. Bagley. What do you mean by investment, Mr. Fithian?

Mr. Fithian. Time, money, resources, commitment.

Mr. Bagley. No, sir. For what that meant, that case is

potentially the most important and the most interesting

operation possible, because as I say the implications under-

lying it -- had we been able to prove, which we never were --

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we were certainly able to give operational indications and

enough to draw - operational conclusions at least

as a basis

for further activity or investigations. But we were not able

to prove that this man was a sent KGB agent.

Had we proved it, all of those implications would have

come to the surface and would have been investigated, and I

think the security of the United States would have been the

better for it. So, I don't think this investment was too great

By five years, you are presumably --

Mr. Fithian. Is that longer than you worked with any

other defector?

Mr. Bagley. Well, it is absolutely unique in the sense

that there was no other defector that we gave either that much

attention to or that type of attention to.

Mr. Fithian. But you concluded, didn't you, that he really

wasn't a very important person in the KGB?

Mr. Bagley. I conclude that he may never have served

properly within the KGB. That he was sent by the KGB to pose

as a KGB agent there is no doubt. He is not a fabricator,

he is not somebody who pretends to be just on his own.

He

had detailed knowledge of KGB opeations, which he claimed to

have been part of his knowledge as an officer.

Mr. Fithian. Is he the only person in your

whole span

that falls in that category?..

Mr. Bagley. No, sir.

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Mr. Fithian. That is, he was sent by the KGB?

Mr. Bagley. No, sir, he is not.

Mr. Fithian. Well, then, I kind of repeat, if that is

your conclusion, and if you thought him designed to mislead

you to start with, you still don't think that much investment

of time and resources and so forth is --

Mr. Bagley. No, very much not so.

If you know the man or you can make the operational

assumption that the man is being sent against you, as we just

have for purposes of this discussion, you can read it in

reverse and find out what really lies behind this mission

of the KGB.

Those indications are very, very interesting. They are as

good as a look inside the KGB files.

By the way, I won't digress here for very long, but I

do want to give you an example to illustrate my answer.

ind Mills

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137

Mr. Bagley. In the invasion of Normandy, 1944, there was

a large, tremendous investment in deception by which the Germans

were led to believe the main thrust of the invasion would fall

on the Pas de Calais region instead of Normandy. Under General

Patton an invasion unit was set up. All the radio communications

which would accompany an army group were set up in trying to

fool the Germans in making them think there was a group there.

There were landing craft much too far away to participate in

the Normandy invasion. The result was the Germans were fooled

and when the invasion struck in Normandy, I believe it was the

Demy

17 German, groups were held at Pas de Calais because the

Germans

believed the Normandy invasion was a diversion. They

held the force there and as you know, the landing was nip and

tuck for 4 days. Had that German force in the north been able

to be present at the landing beaches, it's possible the invasion

would have failed.

The problem is, had the deception been known to the Germans

as a deception, it would have told them that first of all, the

First U.S. Army Group doesn't exist, and second, that the diver-

sion was toward the Pas de Calais to the north, and there was

only one other place for the invasion, and that was

Normandy.

In

other words, the perception of the allied deception

would have been a spectacular piece of intelligence for the

Germans. I don't necessarily want to put this thing on the same

scale as Normandy, but it has all the same effect. If a

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perception is perceived it can be turned against the deceiver,

and that is, in my opinion, what we did so long as we made the

operating assumption Nosenko was sent. In other words, I do

believe it was a valuable expenditure of time.

Mr. Fithian. You think the mistake to depart from that

interpretation was a serious one?

Mr. Bagley. Very. More important in terms of lost

opportunities than the things I speak about in my prepared

testimony about the exposure of personnel to him. I think it's

bad enough to bring him onto the premises

and let him talk to

counterintelligence trainees. I think it a very bad mistake to

let him talk to our foreign liaison agents without informing

him there is a body of evidence suggesting he is no good. I

don't know exactly what they are doing, but in Mr. Helms'

testimony I found an indication, a statement that he was of

value to current counterintelligence investigations. It suggest$

to me that current information, current activities are being

exposed to him. I think that is a mistake.

Mr. Fithian. You say in your letter to the committee, in a

paragraph you say if Nosenko is a KGB plant there can be no

doubt that Nosenko's recited story about Oswald and the USSR is

a message from the KGB. Then you say by sending out such a

message, the KGB exposes the fact it has something to hide.

As Mr. Helms told you, that something may be the fact that

Oswald may be an agent of the KGB.

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Do you have an opinion, and if so, will you provide the

basis for your opinion, on two things: I, the likelihood of

that; and, 2, I am struck by the use of the word "fact" -- that

conveys to me a very strong impression.

Mr. Bagley. That was probably not the very best word I

could have chosen. It was meant to be softened by the verb,

which was "may"' -- one of these messages "may" have been the

fact that. It was not meant it was a statement of fact. It

Felicitously

just follows -- perhaps I can put that more

salicitously by

saying it would hide the possibility -- instead of saying the

operation would hide the fact, say the message hides the

possibility that this man is or could have been a Soviet agent.

By a "Soviet agent" I don't mean a Soviet assassination agent.

I mean something quite different.

Mr. Fithian. I was just asked by Congressman Dodd's staff

to follow up on this, whether or not you would rule out the

possibility that even though the KGB had nothing to do with the

assassination that they would spend this kind of energy or

effort personally to convince us they had nothing to do with it.

Mr. Bagley. I think it entirely conceivable. If you ac-

cept the hypothesis, the supposition, the speculation that in

fact they had something to hide and that something might have

been perhaps he had a code name, perhaps he was a sleeper agent,

they obviously couldn't expect as much from him coming back to

the United States with a Soviet wife, they couldn't expect him

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140

to be elected President, but at the same time, they may have

said, "We will get in touch with you in time of war," or they

may have recruited him by saying, "We will get in touch with you

by the following procedures." This is pure speculation.

But then if he is on their rolls as a sleeper agent or for

wartime sabotage or something of that sort, they would be

absolutely shocked to hear their man had taken it upon himself

to kill the American President. I would think their reaction

could very well be of the sort you suggest. They might indeed

change the mission of another man of another operation in order

to get this message over to us that they really had nothing to

do with it.

The only thing I am quite sure of, I don't want to tell you

what I think is behind us, because I really don't know, but I am

quite sure of one thing, and that is that it's not true. That's

all, it's not true, they didn't speak to him, that the KGB

didn't speak to Oswald in the Soviet Union, that is

not true, by

all logic, by everything we know. I can't prove that, and I am

not making that as a statement of hard fact, but certainly

within the framework of my knowledge of the Soviet Union and the

KGB it is not true.

Mr. Fithian. Mr. Chairman, you will be happy to know I

only have two more questions.

Mr. Hart says rather flat out that there was a direct

conflict between

the two agencies as to interpretation of whether

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or not Nosenko was bona fide. He indicates the FBI thought

Nosenko was bona fide when he arrived and that the CIA assumed

he was a plant when he arrived. Is that accurate?

Mr. Bagley. Again, I don't like. the word "assumed," but

changing that word "assumed" to "suspected" I would certainly

say yes.

Now I don't know the FBI part of it, either. They had no

basis to make such a judgment and they had no stake in it, as

far as I can tell. They had a source coming here who had told

them about a few Americans who had been recruited as tourists in

the Soviet Union, he had a good knowledge as to how the Soviet

Union recruited tourists who have been useful to the FBI. But

they didn't get into as many fields as we did because Nosenko

was a Moscow-based officer.

Mr. Fithian. One other question. Is it totally unreason-

able to speculate that the Agency might be in the process of

leading Nosenko on at this point, using him even now to pass

false information along to the Soviets?

Mr. Bagley. May I ask your third word there, I think you

said "totally" --

Mr. Fithian. "Totally unreasonable."

Mr. Bagley.

Totally excluded, no, it's not totally excluded

because I don't know.. I have not been in the Agency and such

people within the Agency who have talked with him make me

believe it's not so.

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Mr. Fithian. I was trying to look for other alternatives

for the Agency to bristle so intensely as to send over Mr. Hart

and sort of throw up the smokescreen and get the Agency in the

worst possible light as far as the newspapers are concerned.

The whole scenario is so totally unthinkable that I am puzzled.

Mr. Bagley. The only thing I can say is if they were

working on the basis of a hypothesis or knowledge which is most

concretely and specifically represented by myself, it would seem

to me not terribly unreasonable to let me know that instead of

doing what they did to me here.

Therefore, all my instincts tell me that isn't it at all.

Mr. Fithian. You might be expendable?

Mr. Bagley. Yes, but they must get some use out of me

before they dispose of me.

Mr. Fithian. On page 39 of your testimony I would like for

you to look at that again. This is my last point, Mr. Chairman.

Down at the last full paragraph, which starts with "How-"

ever," skipping the first part and dropping down to "Mr. Hart and

Admiral Turner may frivolously dismiss them as they have done

before your committee but the doubts are still there and it's

irresponsible to expose clandestine personnel to this invidivual.

The doubts you refer to are the doubts about Nosenko's

authenticity.

I guess my question is, do you want

to close out the record

standing by that statement?

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Mr. Bagley. Well, I must admit your calling attention to

that -- is it the word "frivolously"?

Mr. Fithian. Both the words "frivolously dismiss them" and

the subordinate charge that they are acting frivolously.

Mr. Bagley. I would be happy because of the emotions

involved in the word to retract the word "frivolously." Quite

happy. But I suppose it has come through my testimony and what

I have said in answer to your questions that I find the use of

this man, the positive use of this man vis-a-vis innocents,

such

as trainees, terribly bothersome.

I know -- I don't think -- I know that the people who are

exposed to Nosenko in counterintelligence training are not

told -- they know there was doubt, but they are being specifical+

ly told, as Admiral Turner pointed out in a memo and as Mr. Hart

has indicated here, was the work of halfwits. If this man is a

Soviet agent and has a mission for the KGB in this country it's

a poor way to have some young man begin his career, to be ex-

posed to him.

Mr. Fithian. In an irresponsible way? I am getting to the

tremendous charge involved in this paragraph.

Mr: Bagley. I appreciate your concern about that and of

course to the contrary I think you are being. -- Mr. Fithian, and

may I ask you for a word, because I think you have offered me an

opportunity to withdraw my word from the testimony and I'm

certainly not going to say no. Knowing now exactly what I meant

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by that, can you think of —- perhaps "I think it wrong to

expose -- perhaps that should be the phraseology there.

Mr. Fithian. I hate to put words in your mouth, but Mr.

Hart and Admiral Turner may dismiss them. To say "frivolously

dismiss them"' might do the Admiral injustice here. Maybe Mr.

Hart's statement before the committee may well constitute, you

know, frivolous treatment or something, I was pretty provoked by

it myself.

Then the second, that it's irresponsible -- it's an error

to expose.

Mr. Bagley. I very definitely will withdraw the word

"irresponsible."

Mr. Fithian. That is in my reading such a terribly serious

charge against the Director --

Mr. Bagley. I accept your comment with appreciation.

Mr. Fithian. Mr. Chairman, I have no further comments.

would like to say this: I enormously appreciate our witness'

I

time and patience with us in this matter. I think it has been

just to me, as an individual Member of the House, just tremen-

dously helpful, perhaps one of the better days I have had on

the committee.

Mr. Bagley. Thank you.

Mr. Preyer. I might just ask one more question which might

be more a comment.

You raise the question of what the explanation of Mr. Hart'$

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testimony was, Mr. Fithian, that where we seem to get a minimum

amount of information about Lee Harvey Oswald, which is what we

were after, and a maximum amount as to Mr. Nosenko's bona fides

in a wide intelligence sense, would one explanation be, could it

be it was simply the CIA's answer to Mr. Epstein's book, which

was current at the time, very much in the news, and in that

book, you are left with the thought there is a mole in the CIA?

If you accept Mr. Epstein's thinking, they may have thought

it worth a little bad publicity temporarily if it would kill.

the idea there was a possible mole in the CIA?

Mr. Bagley. I would say no one I have talked to has had

that reaction to what Mr. Hart did. But on the contrary they

are aghast and confused by it. I don't think it laid anything

to rest. Now, it could very well have been the motive. I have

even looked at the motive of their, in a sense, punishing me for

having helped Mr. Epstein. I have used the analogy of somebody

using a blow on the head, shoots himself in the foot. I don't

believe they have helped their cause very. much by this sort of

reaction.

Mr. Preyer.

Mr. Klein, do you have any further questions?

Mr. Klein. No, I don't, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Preyer. Mr. Bagley, when a witness has concluded his

testimony, under our rules, he is entitled to make a statement

for 5 minutes on any subject that may have come up that he wishes

to clarify or anything further he wishes to say, if there is

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anything further you wish to add at this point, we will

recognize you for 5 minutes for that purpose.

Mr. Bagley. Well, Mr. Fithian has made a kind remark and

I would like to reciprocate, not as a reciprocation but from the

beginning of your work, I got hold of both Mr. Hart's testimony

and the staff's work and was deeply impressed with the quality

of the work of the committee. I have today been treated with

immense courtesy and interest: and knowing full well at your

regular schedule, at a time when you are pressed with some

other things, not the least being the King matter, I am awed,

impressed, and deeply appreciative that you should have given

me the time.

As you know, I wanted to come and answer those charges, but

I also wanted to make some pointswhich I felt important which I

do think are pertinent to your mission.

Nevertheless, whether they are or not, you have received me

with great courtesy and I appreciate it enormously.

Mr. Preyer. Your testimony has been helpful and your

testimony can add to our knowledge in this area. We appreciate

your being here.

If there is nothing further, the committee stands adjourned

(Whereupon, at 4:55 p.m., the committee was adjourned, to

reconvene upon the call of the Chair.)

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