One day in June 1962, Tennent "Pete" Bagley, the Soviet specialist at the CIA station in Berne, was instructed to take the train to Geneva to handle the case of a KGB officer attached to the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference, who was offering his services to the Americans. That short journey turned Bagley into a central figure in perhaps the most controversial and baffling spy story of the entire Cold War.
The KGB officer's name was Yuri Nosenko. At that first meeting he agreed to return to Moscow as a CIA agent-in-place. But in January 1964 he was back in Geneva with the Soviet arms delegates, insisting his cover was about to be blown and that he had to come over to the West. But was he the real thing, or a fake defector sent by the KGB to confuse? If he was a plant, the strategy succeeded brilliantly. For the next dozen years the Nosenko case tied the CIA in knots, paralysing the Agency's vital espionage efforts against its Cold War adversary and destroying careers in the process.
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