Tennent Bagley, who has died aged 88, led the CIAâ??s counterintelligence activities against the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War and was one of the most respected experts on Soviet espionage; but in 2007 he published a book in which he claimed that Yuri Nosenko, seen as one of the most important Soviet defectors of the post-war years, had been a KGB plant.
Codenamed â??Foxtrotâ??â?? by the CIA, Nosenko, the son of one of Stalinâ??s ministers, first approached the CIA in June 1962 when he was serving as a KGB â??escort officerâ? for a delegation attending a disarmament conference in Geneva. Nosenko offered to provide the Americans with information, saying that he hoped to defect some time in the future, his principal short-term objective being to replace funds he had misappropriated from the local rezidentura â?? money of which he had been relieved by a prostitute the night before.
Nosenko was persuaded to continue working in the KGB, but in the meantime he made some significant disclosures. He revealed that the KGB had compromised a British official who had been caught in a honeytrap in Moscow while employed at the British embassy; MI5 soon identified the suspect as the Admiralty clerk, John Vassall. He also named the Canadian ambassador, John Watkins, as having been compromised in the same way, as well as a CIA officer, Edward Ellis Smith. All three allegations proved accurate.
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