Thinking Sideways: Yuri Nosenko

no murder kick recently. H Yeah, so very true. Yeah, this is non violent. This is a very cerebral mystery. In early, very early in nineteen sixty four, about six weeks after the assassination of John F. Ken, a KGB agent who had been working for the CIA as an agent for US as a as a double agent. No, well, I guess if he's a KGB agent, he's sort of a double agent. But then a double Asian is really one who's a KGB agent is working for US, but he's still a KGB agent loyal to they have and

passing disinformation to US. So he was working for US as an Asian agent, but he really actually was a double as although there's still controversy about that. That's one of the mysteries we're going going to address tonight. How much wood could it? Would? Chuck chuck chu chuck would is what that sounded like. Okay, okay, So obviously this is going to be a convoluted show and a little bit. But here's here's the if you're worried about a long, long,

tedious show that grinds on forever. Now I'm going to talk really really fast and we're going to get it done with really fast. Okay, perfect, yeah, okay, all right, okay, so let's go back to the beginning. Who is this guy? His name was Urie A Sinko. Ury was part of a security attachment for a Soviet delegation to disarm It's a disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Okay, so he's Russians. Yep, Yep,

he's a Russian. Okay, remember the kg B. When he was in Geneva, he passed a note secretly, of course, to a US diplomatic requesting a meeting with the US representative, which wasn't that you know, it means a spy. There's the man who was responsible for recruiting Soviet agents in Switzerland was a guy named Tenant Bagley who went by the name Pete. So Pete Bagley, Uh yeah, Tennant's got

of cool. But apparently I don't know, he decided to go by Pete instead, don't I imagine that he probably got ridiculed a lot in school and I just said, oh, my name is Pete. Yeah, or it's just easier, or maybe well the guy is a spy. Maybe that was his like spy name, Yeah, Tenant, Pete. Yeah. They usually give him names like you know, Albatross or by the way,

but in his case it was just Pete. Yeah. So anyway, he was in charge of he and his team were in charge of going after a diplomats, intelligence officers, military attachs, whatever, and so he was notified. He flew to Geneva, he wasn't there at the time, and arranged for a note to be passed back to Nasenko which had a date, time and address on it, especially by day and time.

He was waiting for Nasenko at a safe house and Nasenko eventually showed up a little bit like claimed he was trying to shake off a tail, so okay whatever, and said that he wanted to get some money from the CIA. Apparently he was part of the KGB delegation and he had sort of sort of like drank up. The story varies a little bit. One is that the money was stolen from him by a prostitute. Another one is he just drank and gambled it all the way.

But essentially he was he had taken some official KGB funds and kind of lost it, and he needed funds. He didn't want to get caught. Yeah, his hand in the till. He needed to replace the fund so he offered to sell a manual to a KGB manual for nine hundreds was Friends, which detailed how to follow how the Soviets were able to follow US diplomats in Moscow and other Russian places. Well, and that that was correct

me if I'm wrong, Joe. But that was kind of a big problem for us when we were over there, is our guys kept getting popped left, right and center because the KGB operated differently and we kept falling for their tricks. Well, yeah, exactly, we were. We were evidently pretty easy to find. Uh yeah, and they they you mean,

Americans in Russia were easy to find. That's that's the whole thing is it's so much easier for them to go about their business in our society because we're a free, open society whereas a closed totalitarian society, and so we stick out obviously like a sort thung. We're very easy to follow around and h And also on top of that, they've proved to be very they proved to be very very good at just spoofing us and and and like you know, sending false false agents our direction and just

pumping us full of disinformation. And we've been every time on the line exactly, yeah, we have. Yeah. And then you know, along came along came James Angleton, who was more of a skeptic in that regard. He was he was a lot more, a lot more skeptical about all these wonderful intelligence coups and everything. That made him less than popular with the intelligence gathering arm of the CIA, because you know, they just wanted to bring in lots of good intel and get promotions out of it. But anyway,

I'm getting way ahead of myself. So Pete Bagley asked Nasenko a standard list of questions. Number one, and of course it's a Soviet union about to attack the US. Answer, No, that's that's the one they're supposed to ask. First. Second one asked, he asked if he wants to defect, and the answer was no, because Nasenko said to their family and kids in Moscow, he just wanted to get that

money so he could stay out of trouble. Bagley then asked him if he wanted to work for the CIA and make lots of money, and Nasenko said he'd think about it. So anyway, the meeting when I heard about two hours and then they parted ways. Two days later they got together again, and this time the CENCO had the KGB manual, which detailed how they followed our guys in Moscow, and he had thought about it and decided to be our agent. He returned to Moscow several days later.

He'd been given a code name super cool and code name and like a secret password. And what was his code name? A E foxtrot? Oh yeah, great name. I okay, Well it's better than Pete got on one hand, on the other like a fox trot, like a E f E. Yeah. I have no idea where they call it that. I've heard that said that all these these names they come up with for they just have a randomly generated list, and you just you know, when your name when you come up, then you grab the next one off the top.

It's all random, so there's no connection to you that can be drawn, all right, I guess that's fair. Yeah, okay. So anyway, he returned with some KGB documents and he agreed that just the spy and then eventually went back to Moscow. Pete Bagley went back to Washington to report on all this. He was quite excited about the whole thing. One of the things about Nosenko's he worked, according to him, at least he worked in the second chief director to

the KGB. This is a part of the KGB the CIA had not even been aware of until a few years before, and they knew nothing about it, and so they were quite excited at it to have an agent right in the heart of this whole thing. So Bagley and his boss were very, very excited about the whole thing. Anyway, let me take a quite quick side trip here. So the CIA Soviet Russia division of which Pete Bagley was a part, was the most important branch of their intelligence

collection department. So they've got various departments. The main most important part of part of course, it's the part that goes out and gets intelligence. And then they had like the counterintelligence side, et cetera, et cetera. But of the intelligence gathering part, the Soviet Russia division at that time was the most important division the CIA. Sure it had its own counterintelligence branch also, and eventually Pete Bagley wanted

up being ahead of the counterintelligence branch with that. And there's another counterintelligence branch which is CIA Counterintelligence, which was headed by James Jesus Angleton, who I'm sure you guys have all heard of christ Hits, Yeah exactly, yeah, so yeah, So what they focus on is preventing penetration of the organization by foreign intelligence services. And also another one of

their jobs is to sort out information from disinformation. And this leads to and so in other words, because foreign intelligence services are constantly going to be trying to feed you lies and manipulate your perception of what they're up to, then you have to find a way to sort out the validity of these people that come present themselves and want to be your agent. So anyway, badly, as I was saying, was back in Washington, he got a message

from Angleton requesting to have a meeting with him. I've already told you who he is. James Jesus Angleton was the head of CIA counter Intelligence. So Angleton in his office, Angleton hands him a file about a Soviet defector, and the account that I read of this, it didn't say who the defector was, but I presume it's Anatotly Delitsen, who was an actual autentic Soviet defector who defected a few years before Nosenko. The high points of Nosenka's story

were basically identical to the other file stories. So in other words, it was it became kind of obvious that Nosenka was probably just a dangle. He was just somebody that had been dangled in front of our guys and we took the bait and so and so he was probably, in Angleton's opinion, he was almost certainly a double Asian and not for real. So he was just going to pass us dense information. So he's basically just regurgitating a story that they'd used on us, or somebody had told

us before. Then. Yeah, because you know, it's like it's like, as one guy put it, it's like fly fishing, you know, you know, you try a lure and you send it out there. If it doesn't work, you change lures and you just keep going like that until the fish bites. And you know you've got a good lure, so let's start using that lure a lot. And that's what they do.

And so, yeah, one of the one of the interesting things is like one of the things that the KGB knows that we like to see is an agentist got a little bit of a problem with either you know, Booze or women or something like that, some weakness. It's going to make him spend too much money or whatever. And then of course he's going to need to turn to us for money in terms for secrets and stuff like that. And so that was definitely a part of

Nasenko's story, Booze, the women, the whole thing. Pete Bagley was very disappointed because he was very excited about landing this big fish. Angleton, on the other hand, felt like, well, you know, we can he's still useful. We could pass we could pass a little misinformation back through him to the KGB. So it's not all it's not all bad. That's where the story leaves out. For the time being, they kept him on a payroll, but they labeled his

information as untrustworthy. Of course, of course they didn't go tell him that. They made him believe that they still believed his story. But anyway, he was back in Russia. Time goes by, and as I said earlier, about six weeks century JFK is assassinated. He send he sends a message wanted, requesting a meeting again in Geneva, and when he meets with Bagley this time, he wants to defect. Okay, so how how long is that after like our first encounter, about a year and a half, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,

I don't know. Oh yeah, you know, I don't think I said what the day it was the day it was like June nineteen sixty two when he first made contact with us. Oh okay, So I'm glad you clarified that. For some reason, to me, it was a much shorter time span. And I think it's just because everything starts up about where you're you're at right now, and yeah, some of the details I think I go over. Yeah. Yeah, so now he'd been in our employee feeding sbs for about you know, a year and a half, and we've

been feeding mbs. Oh yeah, of course, yeah, And that's there's great ways you can do that. You know, if you know this guy's at double you can do you can do things like request information about this, about that, and say you're like super interested exactly so to give them an idea of of you know, of what we're wondering about your military grade beatles. Uhh exactly. Yeah, we'd like to know about ice fishing off your eastern coast. Uh, you just ran how many information about that? Oh? You

do so one of the yeah, and the spy. In the spy business, every little, every teeny little tidbit gets gets considered, so you know, and so any little piece of BS that you can feed him is valuable. So he says he wants to defect, and so he cabled back to vaguely cable back to CIA headquarters and and even though this guy was obviously a double Asian, they had and they sad, he said, leting him defect. Unfortunately, oh you know, I left out the most important part.

Let me get let me go back here for a sec. He said he wanted to defect, and he said that the reason he wanted to defect is that he was that he had come into suspicion and even more importantly, he said that he knew something about Lee Harvey Oswald, Right, that's right, Okay, the assassination connections, that's right. So yeah, so the department that he worked for, uh, in the in that department, subdepartment within that is what's called the

Tourist Bureau. And what they're and their job is there, it's a counterintelligence thing. And underneath that counterintelligence division, they there are agents in their own departments who just follow around journalists and the Western diplomats and tourists who are in actually in the Soviet Union, trying to recruit them and been also basically spying on them. So since Oswald wasn't an American in Russia, he would have fallen into

the purview of this guy's buried department. And and so that made it must have made him stand out even more, is you know, curiosity to them. Yeah, and you know somebody a potentially valuable recruit, perhaps, you know, assassin who knows the Senko says that he was actually assigned to watch Oswald wile Oswald was there. And then after the assassination, Oswald of course by the time obviously had left the

Soviet Union. Yeah, yeah, quite obviously a couple months. Yeah, yeah, And so after the assassination, he was apparently assigned to go through all of his KGB files and interview interview everybody and you know, just find out precisely, you know, who talked to him and what then, and who had made contact with him, and if if there really was

any sort of KGB control over this guy over Oswald. Sure, and of course he reported absolutely not well, and that would that would be really important for them to know because if they are some way responsible for the assassination of an American president at a time where we were always ready with the thumb on the big red button, Yeah, there's another world going on. That's not something you want to have happened or have anybody find out about. Yeah.

Even though he was untrusted, he didn't really have a lot of value to us as a defector. Uh. And this one clear up to the CA director Richard Hilmes, he was a director at the time, he authorized the affection because otherwise they could have been accused of suppressing information relevant to the assassinationw So, so they smuggled him, smuggled them out of Switzerland on a military plane, got them back to the States, and at this point they were wondering exactly what to do with them, so they

did the obvious thing. They had locked him up, Yeah, having a dungeons. Yeah yeah. They built a little special cell forum in the basement of a house in Washington suburbs and basically locked him up and interrogated him for about three and a half years. Wow. Yeah, Yeah, they went after him quite a bit. It's a long interrogation. Yeah, yeah, especially for somebody who came to you and said, hey, we I want to defect to America because I have

this information. Well there's some issues though, and I don't know if you were going to get to this, Joe, But one of the things that I know really prompted them to go ahead and lock him up initially was the fact that his reason for wanting to defect was he had gotten correct me if I'm wrong here, is that he had gotten a cable saying come back to Moscow, at which point he was worried they'd figured out he was playing the game and he was going to be killed.

But when we had everybody look into it, there was no record of the request this cable. Yeah, it took it took a little while to sort that out. I think, I guess, yeah, I guess it's just the three years is like a really long time. Yeah, it's a long time. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's definitely above and beyond. Yeah, it sounds like, you know, and and I don't think we're ever going to get to the bottom quite exactly why he was locked up and interrogated for quite that long of a time.

They did catch him out in a couple of them, a couple of significant lives, actually more than a couple. One was one was about the cable, the telegram recalling him, and another significant aside about that is that the FBI had a major source called Fedora, and he was a he was a Soviet diplomat in New York and that was his code named Fedora. That's not his Russian name. But so they'd been this this guy, Fedora was a double agent also and they didn't know it, of course,

and he'd been feeding them disinformation for years. Yeah, so Fedora.

So Fedora comes along and they're they're asking him if he knows anything about Nosenko, and he's saying, well, you know, the the chief of the KGB KGB office in New York had called a meeting in a bunch of kg KGB agents and also Fedora, who was a diplomat but still a high level Russian so he was in on this and and spelled out a few details, a lot of relevant details actually, like his rank and the KGB lieutenant colonel, which it later turned out he'd been lying about.

Nasenko admitted that under interrogation, and also he confirmed that yes,

there had indeed been a telegram recalling him. He'd heard about that also, you know, and of course this was like later like sort of you know, backfart of Fedora a little bit, because it sort of, you know, after Nosenko confessed that he'd been lying about this stuff, suddenly people are looking at Fedora and thinking, gee, gosh, why exactly are you telling us this stuff which corroborates his story when we know specifically that this stuff was a

lot because he admitted it. And that's and and the fact that Fedora eventually was proven to be a double agent who was trying to back up his story sort of as another nail and uring Cenko's coffin. Yeah, Fodor was obviously a spy, so that that makes that makes the CENCO a double as two, I know, all right. So anyway, so they interrogated in for three and a half years. And by the way, this was not done, h not done just like unauthorized or anything like that.

Richard Helms, again director of the CIA, went to the Department of Justice, which was headed by Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, and got permission to lock this guy up and detain him for as long as need be to

try to ring any information out of him. They were accused later on of withholding information from the FBI and from the Warren Commission, which was investigating the JFK assassination, but Helms had actually met with Chief Justice Earl Warren explained to him the reason why because Warren had heard about the CENCO and was thinking about how calling him to testify and explain to him why he would not

be a reliable witness. And so but nonetheless, I mean still to this day there's there's people who accuse the CIA of imprisoning him specifically to keep him from the FBI, the Commission. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, because you know, people love a good conspiracy theory, especially concerning GfK. Yeah. JFK is one of the longest running I feel conspiracy theory. Oh god, yeah, oh yeah, I didn't get into that. His assassinate that's another mystery we need to solve, by

the way, real quickly. GfK assassination. He was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald was a hardcore communist and the devote of Fidel Castro, and you know, probably not quite too straight in the head. But what about the woman in the babushka, what about the four shooters? Yeah, this is one area where the second may have been

telling the truth. And he was asked about about whether the kgb A contacted Oswald tried to recruit him, and what he said was that he had been had been watched, obviously, and it had been decided that he was not quite smart enough and too unstable to really be good effective as so sure, and that's fair. That's yeah, that sounds plausible to me. Probably accurate. Yeah, it's it's pretty probably accurate assessment. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, okay, and

now we sell the JFK assassination. Let's get back to this thing. Let me go to the next one. I know, I know who else was assassinated and Nko. Eventually, as I said, confessed had lied about certain things, but he never completely recanned his entire story. Eventually he was released. He was given a large sum of money and a

new identity and relocated. And the most mysterious or one of the mysterious, most mysterious parts of this whole thing is he was quote unquote rehabilitated by the CIA, which is like and I've got and I've heard some declassified documents like I've got I've got some memos from Angleton to the FBI, for example, detailing and great detail, all the many many reasons why no sinko and it should not be believed when you look at it. It's pretty dumb,

stated is to Nasenko's case. And actually, if if our listeners are lucky, I'll post a couple of those on our websites. Yeah, they'red of it's kind of funny there. They're kind of old and smudgie. They were just recently the classified, old and smudgie with a lot of markings all over them and stuff. But there some of them

are pretty interesting and eye opening. But anyway, I guess you know, if you have somebody in the basement locked up for three and a half years, and you're like torturing them for information for three and a half years. When you release them, it behooves you to say, oh, no, they're rehabilitated and they're never going to talk about this ever, then saying like no, this person is still like maybe dangerous,

but we're just gonna like release them anyways. Yeah, you know, I think if you torture somebody enough, they're going to get rehabilitated to what you want. I am maybe. Well, then the other thing is, you know, at what point do you realize that, Wow, we've had this guy here for a long time and he hasn't changed the story anymore. Should we stop or Stockholm syndrome? Well do we just keep going? Yeah, a certain point, you know, it's like, you know, this guy quite likely is still lying to

you about some major things. Maybe, but obviously he's not going to break so you know after three and a half years, so it's just time to cut to the chase. Or he does, right and he says, no, I was lying. I was lying about everything. Can you release me now? Because it's been three and a half years and in dungeon in a basement. Yeah, I'm kind of tired of this, tired of it. Yeah, No, you're totally right. You're totally right.

You're totally right about everything. You know that. I would say that if I were in the basement for three and a half years. Yeah, absolutely, I would agree with whatever. If you said, yeah, you are you know, you're a North Korean spy, I would say, yep, yeah, is that going to make you release me? Okay? Yeah, I got to tell you. If I'm a spy and they and they put me in the torture chamber, I'm going to just say, hey, dude, no need, I'll tell you whatever you want to know. I'm a spy. Why none of

us would make good spies? Yeah, exam yeah, yeah. Well but anyway, this is where the whole thing gets turned upside down because everybody, I mean Angleton and the head of the and Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and look at the head of the Soviet Russian Division, and

also his underlying Pete Bagley. Every all of them were totally convinced that Nosenka was a double agent, and they had good reason to believe so, and h and yet when I say that Nosenka was rehabilitated, what that means is basically, the CIA changed their minds and decided, you know, he's for real after all, and he's a good guy, and so they, like I said, they let him go. And they actually he wound up eventually getting getting well

paid to be a counter intelligence consultant to the CIA. Meantime, Yeah, the chief, the head of the Soviet Russian Division was transferred off to some other backwater somewhere. Pete Bagley was also passed over for promotion, transferred up to a backwater somewhere. Angleton was cashiered, even though he had nothing to do with the imprisonment with the guys that had actually had

some to do with the imprisonment. Well, maybe that's kind of an interesting mystery, is how exactly is it that despite all the massive evidence of the contrary, they just decided that he was there for it was their boy, and they actually hired him to be a consultant. Yeah, that's that's a mystery. Again, I think that I don't mean to interrupt your Joe, but again I think that somebody finally realized, you've had this guy for three and

a half years, You've got nothing out of him. Yeah, it's time to cut him loose and we're not going to have egg on our face. We've got to do something to pretend or attempt to put a band aid on this and make it look okay. Well, you know, and that could be it. I mean, that's that's you know, there's a couple of ways of looking at the purge.

That's the Soviet Russian Division purge. One is that the mole triumph to manage to like, you know, kill everybody that stood stood in his path, and that was a threat to him, and God, all the people who are threatening him removed. That's one way of looking at it, or another way of looking at it is like you say, when this came out, it was it was kind of controversial.

This is the only person who'd ever been in prisoned by the CIA, much less for three and a half years, so they might have decided it was, you know, was maybe the best thing to do was to sort of cashier the people are responsible for this whole thing and just pretend like, yeah, it's all in the up and up. They did wrong. We love you, we love you Ury. So maybe that is, as you say, maybe that is what they were doing. Well, we will hang on a

second here. I don't suddenly saying the mole. So was Uri saying the whole time that there was a mole in the CIA? Or no? Or is this just some people have said there was a mole in the mole? Or is the mall no? Now, you're obviously wouldn't have been a very good mole since nobody ever believed him. Yeah, yeah, Angleton, Angleton firmly believed in the male that there was a mole and there and there's other evidence to that. I'd actually I get to that in a second. But yeah,

it's quite possible if there was a mole. But like I said, the other possibility is just that the CIA decided to do play politics and just cashier these people to sort of forestall scandal. Yeah, I guess. You know, if you've got somebody for three and a half years, right, Yeah, and their story isn't changing and it turns out that perhaps they've been innocent this whole time, how do you deal with that? Yeah? You know, how do you save face? You?

You know, say, all these people are getting older, they're going to go take over these backwater places. That's going to take some early retirement. And this person that we've been holding for three and a half years, is getting a very large cast cash settlement and gets to go live a totally normal life. That's what's happening. That's how we're going to make this go away. Yeah, I don't

think that. I don't think that anybody. It's hard for me to believe that anybody ever thought that he was innocent of all charges or that he was totally on the up and up and not a double agent. Sure, but worthy of being held for three and a half years. At a certain point he had to be like go

obviously he had to be. I mean, but the major players involved, including Angleton and Pete Bagley, always believed, you know, after that, that he was he was a double agent, and certainly there was good reason for that was that, I guess you know. My question then is like was that normal treatment of double agents? Like if they capture double agent agent, did they just throw them in normal jail?

Did they like what did they do with that? You know? Well, generally speaking, if you have a double agent, they're usually living overseas. So somebody that's pretending to, like, say, work for the KGB, he's working with the KGB, but pretending to work for you while he's actually working for them. Still. Sure, so you're not going to capture and throw them or jail or anything like that. You're just usually just gonna be mysterious. Depth is how do you take care of that?

I would I would presume. No, you don't even do that. You you know, you just feed them misinformation again by by you let them feed you disinformation, thinking that they're succeeding and misleading you even though they're not. Come on, come on, I'm going. I'm going with the bored identity thing. That's when you kill them. That's more fun. I know,

I like that better too. I'm sure it happens every now and again, but it's actually more profitable to do stuff like like feed them misinformation, like I was saying earlier, by just the questions that you asked them. You can just lead them, sure, but anyway, so last of all, I don't want to stretch this on forever. We can go back and forth, and we're in this whole wilderness of mirrors thing, and who the hell knows, I mean,

it's really hard to know. But yeah, but as far as the existence of the mole goes, I mean, we've had moles in the CIA before there was there was Kim Philby back in the late forties. He was he was a British liaison to the CIA. He turned out to be a Soviet agent and of course more recently too late to be the mole in this case. But Aldra James started working in the late sixties for the CIA. That was Did you've heard of Alder James? Right? I

like that. Joe keep saying these names like you and I actually think did they make they made a movie about this guy about five or ten years ago? Didn't his names there? Philby? Uh No, the second guy, the one Alder James. Yeah, because he was doing he was a mole and doing this for thirty years or something, some horrendous amount of time. I don't know if he thirty years, but it was a long time. And what was most amazing about it was how brazen the guy was.

I'd say, for argument's sake that I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, of course I know what you're talking about. Just for our listeners, precisely, precisely what are you talking I'll do this really briefly, because he's obviously not the mole in question here. He's never uncovered that we know of, but you never know. Sometimes moles are uncovered and they're just quietly, quietly sent out the pasture, you know, because they don't want to scandal James.

So let's go to Audre James. He joined the CIA, I believe in nineteen sixty nine, and he was working as an analyst. And it's been a while, so I've actually forgotten a lot of the details, but some of the most I remember some of the most hilarious details, which is that for he worked in the office at Langley and he would actually just walk out of the building some days with grocery bags full of secret documents

into the Russians. So the guy drove the guy was, you know, a civil servant, but he drove a Jaguar and he had a six hundred thousand dollars house that he paid for with cash. And he's like, they didn't catch him, and they didn't catch him for years, and so I mean, how competent these guys are? Serious he did it was ten twenty years something like that. Yeah, I mean I have a long time. Yeah, I mean I have not spent a while, and I have not

brushed up in my recollection. The whole thing. But the whole thing was the scandalous thing about it was not just the secrets, but how easy it was and how crazy the guy was, and then the general incompetence of the people that were supposed to keep an eye for stuff like this. Okay, yeah, so this maybe more off. Kim Phillby real quick like Kim Phillbby was a rising star in six the Brittish Secret Service. He was son of Sir Harold Phillby, who was the lawrence of Arabia

of the Saywudi clan. Yeah, I know he've heard of all even you know all that stuff, right, So he was a son of Harold Phillyby. He was a rising star. It was almost a certainty that he would be the next director of m I six and for a time he was sent out to be liaison with the CIA,

which had been recently formed. The CIA did not start until nineteen forty seven, and so he spent a lot of time over here from forty seven to nineteen fifty helping us get started and serving as a liaison between the two services, giving us advice and spending a lot of time talking with us, especially with Angleton. I think

this is probably a formative searing experience for Angleton. Spent a lot of time talking with James Angleton about what was going on, and of course afterwards Angleton realized he'd been had. Maybe that was what made him so suspicious about this kind of second future. So anyway, he wasn't old. But anyway between that time, of course there exists the

possibility of other moles too. And the thing about about a mole is that if you're trying to penetrate a service or deceive a service, like to seea what you need to have, what's really kind of essential, is to have feedback. You need to know that you're actually your story is believed and that your ruse is working. And so otherwise you just keep trying the same old thing over and over again and it's not working and you don't even realize it's not working or why it's not working.

So that doesn't so the fact that you know that doesn't prove anything necessarily. But but what's interesting about the no Cenco case is that as far as the Soviets knew he was a valid disinformation agent, we had recruited him, he was feeding SBS that that in a sense, in

a sense that essentially made him a valuable person. And yet suddenly they decide we're gonna make We're going to have the guide defect over to our side to argue the case for why Oswald had nothing to do with the kg B. So that would argue for the existence of the mole, because the mole had the mole was aware that we didn't trust the CENCO anyway and that we were unsure that he was really not a double agent.

So I guess at that point that that mole would have been like pretty high up, it would have been. He would have been yeah, yeah, pretty high up. Yeah, not just like a run of the mill agent. No, no, no, obviously, because there's compartmentalization. Although then again, considering some of the stuff that's like with the Ames case, who they put this stuff on this in the company newsletter comes all around line this year be sure if you run into Nansenko.

So if it was assuming that goes purpose, assuming he was sent and the purpose of his being sent was to reassure us that he had had no that Oswald had no part in the assassination, no connection to them, Yeah, then then it would makes sense because he would be upond that would be easily sacrificed because they knew, through the existence of their feedback device, the mole, they knew

he was of no value to them anyway. Sure, so yeah, otherwise they're sacrificing a valuable asset for no particular reason. All right, So that's one argument for the existence of the mold. Supposing supposing also that they wanted to send him to discredit embarrass the CIA. Supposing they know through their asset on on our side, they know that he

is not not particularly believed or trusted. So they know that when he shows up with his story about Oswald and how he knew Oswald and this, did this back, that did all this investigation of Oswald, and then the CIA of course thinks it's BS and so they don't and so they don't take him to the Warren Commission

or the FBI or anybody else to testify. Later on, he calls a press conference and says, hey, you know, I showed up to the CIA headquarters and with all this information about Oswald, and you know, they just tried to shut me up. They didn't let me testify before the Warren Commission, and that can then that could be just one more way of sowing confusion and suspicion and conspiracy theories, which is yet another So again, and this is all pure speculation on my part, sure, but they

would both sort of semi support the existence. Certainly is the possibility the existence of a mole in the ranks of the CIA. So I guess the big mystery here is was there a mole? And if there was, who was it? All Right, here's the here's the part where we flip a coin. Okay, anybody got a quarter? No? Yeah, okay, all right, heads, heads, it's okay. There was a molemal yeah, yeah. I think that's how that's how we're kind of this. We are kind of in the wilderness and mirrors here.

So sometimes tails meets heads, yeah, yeah, you never know, sometimes it lands on its side. Yeah, that happens a lot does Yeah. So anyway, and in researching this thing, I've come across some interesting declassified documents, like some memos from Angleton to the FBI. So some of them I still I'm still actually rooting to a lot of There's there's quite a few of them out there. I obviously we're not going to put them all out there in

the website. Stuff. I thought it might be interesting to put one or two out there, so we'll have links to those things for you guys to look at. Where are we going to have links for that. We're going to have those like on our website, I think, which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com if you want to, If you want to send us an email, send us an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. You can find us an iTunes, find us on Facebook.

Oh and yes, of course you can find us on Stitcher. Anyway. That's it for now, so long everybody, Thanks a lot, guys, Bye, feel so unfinished