Tennent Harrington "Pete" Bagley, Dr. pol. sci.

Dr Tennent H. (‘Pete’) Bagley, former intelligence operator, knowledgeable expert on Soviet intelligence history, and author of several important books on the KGB. Dr Warren W. ‘Bud’ Williams, an outstanding former intelligence officer, decorated US Ranger, and an academic historian with special interest in Austria, gave important advice From acknowledgment page in STALIN’S AGENT the life and death of alexander orlov BORIS VOLODARSKY. Janet Milburn 7/31/17

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/us/politics/tennent-h-bagley-who...
Tennent H. Bagley, a former C.I.A. officer who helped a mysterious Soviet spy betray his country, then tried for a half-century to prove that the defector was actually a Russian double agent, died on Feb. 20 at his home in Brussels. He was 88.

The cause was cancer, his son, Andrew, said.

Mr. Bagley’s big case caused a war within the C.I.A. and elsewhere in the national security complex for decades over whether the defector he encouraged, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, was really a Soviet agent sent to trick the Americans.

Most compelling, as a member of the K.G.B., the Soviet spy service, Mr. Nosenko claimed to have handled the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy, during the two and a half years that Oswald lived in the Soviet Union after defecting there in 1959.

After the assassination, one conspiracy theory posited that Oswald had been acting as a Soviet agent when he shot the president in Dallas in November 1963.

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But Mr. Nosenko insisted that the K.G.B. had dismissed any idea of using Mr. Oswald for anything — much less an assassination — because he was unstable.

The Nosenko case has been examined in a dozen or more books and many articles, some of which were written in-house by the C.I.A. and later declassified. Other information has emerged through freedom-of-information requests and interviews that Mr. Bagley conducted with former K.G.B. officers.

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According to these accounts, on June 8, 1962, Mr. Nosenko was in Geneva accompanying a Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference as a security officer. He passed a note to an American diplomat at the meeting asking to be put in touch with a “representative” of the United States government. By that he was understood to mean a C.I.A. officer.

The diplomat called Mr. Bagley, known as Pete. Officially he was the 36-year-old second secretary at the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland’s capital, but clandestinely he worked for the C.I.A.’s elite Soviet division.

Mr. Nosenko flew to Geneva, where he was met by Mr. Bagley and a Russian speaker, George Kisevalter, who had been sent from C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. Tim Weiner, in his 2007 book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” wrote that Mr. Nosenko arrived “very drunk” for the first meeting at a secret location and told of a prostitute stealing $200 from him.

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His first order of business was to recoup his $200 — he was worried about the K.G.B.’s strict policies regarding expenses — and so for that price he offered the Americans a copy of the K.G.B. manual on techniques for tracking Western diplomats in Moscow.

Mr. Bagley gave him the money and asked him if he wanted to defect. He said no, explaining that he had a wife and children in Moscow. Mr. Bagley was relieved; he hoped to persuade Mr. Nosenko to spy against his country.

Mr. Bagley offered him $25,000 for every Soviet source in the West he might expose. Mr. Nosenko shrugged and said he would consider it, according to an article by Edward Jay Epstein in 1977. Two days later, he said yes.

Mr. Bagley cabled headquarters and reported that Mr. Nosenko had “conclusively proven his bona fides.”

Six weeks after the Kennedy assassination, Mr. Nosenko contacted the C.I.A. and asked to speak with “George,” the name by which he knew Mr. Bagley. He told Mr. Bagley that he would again be with the disarmament delegation in Geneva and that this time he wanted to defect to the United States, because, he said, he was under suspicion and feared he would be arrested.

The C.I.A. flew him out of Geneva and took him to a safe house outside Washington. Almost immediately, C.I.A. officers found problems with his story. At different times he said he was a colonel and a captain. He contradicted an earlier defector whom the agency had reason to trust. He could not describe the layout of the K.G.B. headquarters in Moscow. He did not mention any wife and children.

His Oswald story drew the most interest, but Mr. Weiner wrote that the C.I.A. did not tell the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, about it until days before the panel finished its work. The commission’s final report did not mention Mr. Nosenko.

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James J. Angleton, the chief C.I.A. official responsible for catching foreign spies, was particularly skeptical about Mr. Nosenko. He said he feared that Mr. Nosenko’s true purpose was to sabotage Mr. Angleton’s hunt for “moles,” or double agents, in the C.I.A.

It became Mr. Bagley’s job to oversee the interrogation of Mr. Nosenko, after Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had approved his being held without trial. First in a safe house and then at a C.I.A. training site in Virginia, Mr. Nosenko was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to various discomforts, including cold, continuous light and periods of hunger. Mr. Bagley questioned him again and again, harshly. The ordeal lasted three years.

Mr. Weiner quoted an audiotape of one interrogation made by the C.I.A. “From my soul ... I beg you to believe me,” Mr. Nosenko says in Russian. In English, Mr. Bagley three times screams back an expletive expressing disbelief.

In years to come, at least half a dozen other teams questioned Mr. Nosenko, and congressional committees and others reviewed the case. In 1969, Mr. Nosenko was given $80,000, an apology, a new identity and placed on the C.I.A. payroll. Part of his exoneration resulted from the hundreds of investigative leads he provided that turned out to be true. Mr. Nosenko died in 2008 at 81.

Mr. Bagley, who once described his career as navigating “a maze of mirrors,” never stopped trying to prove that Mr. Nosenko was a Soviet plant, writing books and articles that many thought persuasive.

Reviewing Mr. Bagley’s book “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games” (2007) in The Washington Post, David Ignatius wrote that Mr. Bagley had “gathered strong evidence” that Mr. Nosenko “could not have been who he initially said he was.”

Opinion about Mr. Nosenko has remained divided. In 2007, the C.I.A. canceled a talk Mr. Bagley was to give at the agency. The Washington Times reported that some officers objected to his views.

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Tennent Harrington Bagley was born into a naval family on Nov. 11, 1925, in Annapolis, Md. He spent his childhood in France, California, Washington and Hawaii and interrupted his studies at Princeton to serve in the Marine Corps during World War II. After the war, he graduated from the University of Southern California, and later earned a doctorate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

In addition to his son, Andrew, Mr. Bagley is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Maria Lonyay; his daughters Christina Bagley Rocca and Patricia Bagley; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Bagley, who at the height of his career ran the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence operations against the Soviet bloc and was deputy chief of the agency’s Soviet bloc division, later worked as a business consultant to chemical and avionics firms.

Once, when asked what he would say to Mr. Nosenko if they met, he had a quick answer:

“Don’t shoot.”