The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [31]
In exchange for the money, Nosenko promised to spy for the CIA in Moscow, and in January 1964 he met directly with CIA handlers to discuss his findings. This time, Nosenko had big news: He claimed to have handled the KGB file of Lee Harvey Oswald and said it contained nothing suggesting the Soviet Union had foreknowledge of Kennedy’s assassination, potentially ruling out Soviet involvement in the event. He was willing to share more of the file’s details with the CIA if he would be allowed to defect and resettle in the United States.
Nosenko’s offer was quickly transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It seemed like a potentially enormous break: Only months after Kennedy had been shot, determining who was behind his assassination was one of the agency’s top priorities. But how could they know if Nosenko was telling the truth? James Jesus Angleton, one of the lead agents on Nosenko’s case, was skeptical. Nosenko could be a trap—even part of a “master plot” to draw the CIA off the trail. After much discussion, the agents agreed to let Nosenko defect: If he was lying, it would indicate that the Soviet Union did know something about Oswald, and if he was telling the truth, he would be useful for counterintelligence.
As it turned out, they were wrong about both. Nosenko traveled to the United States in 1964, and the CIA collected a massive, detailed dossier on their latest catch. But almost as soon as he started the debriefing process, inconsistencies began to emerge. Nosenko claimed he’d graduated from his officer training program in 1949, but the CIA’s documents indicated otherwise. He claimed to have no access to documents that KGB officers of his station ought to have had. And why was this man with a wife and child at home in Russia defecting without them?
Angleton became more and more suspicious, especially after his drinking buddy Kim Philby was revealed to be a Soviet spy. Clearly, Nosenko was a decoy sent to dispute and undermine the intelligence the agency was getting from another Soviet defector. The debriefings became more intense. In 1964, Nosenko was thrown into solitary confinement, where he was subjected for several years to harsh interrogation intended to break him and force him to confess. In one week, he was subjected to polygraph tests for twenty-eight and a half hours. Still, no break was forthcoming.
Not everyone at the CIA thought Nosenko was a plant. And as more details from his biography became clear, it came to seem more and more likely that the man they had imprisoned was no spymaster. Nosenko’s father was the minister of shipbuilding and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee who had buildings named after him. When young Yuri had been caught stealing at the Naval Preparatory School and was beaten up by his classmates, his mother had complained directly to Stalin; some of his classmates were sent to the Russian front as punishment. It was looking more and more as though Yuri was just “the spoiled-brat son of a top leader” and a bit of a mess. The reason for the discrepancy in graduation dates became clear: Nosenko had been held back a year in school for flunking his exam in Marxism-Leninism, and he was ashamed of it.
By 1968, the balance of senior CIA agents came to believe that the agency was torturing an innocent man. They gave him $80,000, and set him up in a new identity somewhere in the American South. But the emotional debate over his veracity continued to haunt the CIA for decades, with “master plan” theorists sparring with those who believed he was telling the truth. In the end, six separate investigations were made into Nosenko’s case. When he passed away in 2008, the news of his death was relayed to the New York Times by a “senior intelligence official” who refused to be identified.
One of the officials most affected by the internal debate was an intelligence analyst by the name of Richards Heuer. Heuer had been recruited to the CIA during the Korean War, but he had always been interested in philosophy, and especially the branch