Thinking Sideways: Yuri Nosenko

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking sideways. I don't under see it. You never know
the stories of things. We simply don't know the answer too. Well.
Hi there, this is thinking sideways and I'm Joe and

(00:25):
joined us always buy Steve. There we go. Okay, we're
ready to solve the mystery. Okay, I know, no intro
straight into it. I like your way. Yeah. Yeah, so
this mystery, unfortunately, it's doesn't involve any bloodshed. There's no murders,
no supernatural stuff. I know. I'm kind of on a

(00:47):
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,

(01:09):
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

(01:30):
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?

(01:53):
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,

(02:17):
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,

(02:39):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:23):
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.

(03:44):
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

(04:07):
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,

(04:30):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:13):
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

(05:34):
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

(05:55):
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,

(06:19):
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.

(06:40):
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,

(07:03):
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

(07:23):
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

(07:45):
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,

(08:09):
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,

(08:31):
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,

(08:54):
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

(09:15):
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

(09:37):
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

(09:57):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:39):
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,

(11:03):
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,

(11:23):
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

(11:43):
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

(12:04):
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,

(12:26):
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

(12:49):
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

(13:10):
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

(13:36):
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

(13:58):
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,

(14:20):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:06):
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

(15:29):
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

(15:51):
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,

(16:14):
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

(16:35):
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

(16:55):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:39):
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

(17:59):
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.

(18:23):
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,

(18:45):
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,

(19:07):
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

(19:31):
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

(19:53):
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

(20:14):
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

(20:35):
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

(20:57):
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

(21:18):
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,

(21:41):
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

(22:04):
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,

(22:25):
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

(22:46):
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

(23:07):
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

(23:27):
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

(23:49):
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,

(24:10):
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

(24:30):
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

(24:50):
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

(25:11):
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?

(25:31):
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

(25:51):
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?

(26:13):
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

(26:33):
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,

(26:55):
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

(27:16):
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.

(27:36):
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

(27:56):
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

(28:18):
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

(28:39):
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

(29:00):
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

(29:22):
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

(29:42):
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

(30:03):
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

(30:24):
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.

(30:47):
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

(31:09):
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

(31:32):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:15):
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

(32:36):
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

(32:59):
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,

(33:20):
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

(33:42):
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

(34:03):
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

(34:25):
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

(34:46):
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.

(35:06):
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

(35:28):
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

(35:49):
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,

(36:11):
feel so unfinished