Yuri Nosenko

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Lt. Col. Yuriy Nosenko was a KGB defector who became a figure of significant controversy within the USA intelligence community.

Nosenko was deputy chief of the Seventh Department of the KGB. He started working as a double agent for the CIA in 1962. In 1964 he claimed that he had been discovered by the KGB and needed to defect immediately. The CIA was leery about the defection, as they could not verify that he had been issued recall orders by Moscow, but went ahead with the defection.

Nosenko claimed that he could provide important information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, claiming that he personally handled the case of Lee Harvey Oswald. Nosenko further claimed that Oswald was not useful as a KGB agent because he was "mentally unstable". Nosenko also stated that KGB had never questioned Oswald about information he had learned as aviation electronics operator at Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan. Two lie detector tests conducted by the CIA suggested that Nosenko was lying about Oswald. Moreover, Nosenko confessed that he had lied to the CIA about his military rank.

Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton decided that Nosenko was a fake. Nosenko was seized by CIA officers in Washington and held in solitary confinement in an attic measuring only ten square feet. Agents strapped wires to his head, telling him falsely that the device was an electroencephalograph which would allow them to read his mind, while the device was really one to read brainwave patterns. This was a form of psychological intimidation in order to help persuade him to "tell the truth". He was interrogated for 1,277 days, and fed very little food, allowed to wash only once a week and given no radio, television or reading materials.^{[citation needed]}

After his time in interrogation, he was tied up, dropped down a laundry chute into a waiting station wagon and taken to a custom-made prison cell for the next two years.

Unbeknownst to Nosenko, there was a powerful anti-Angleton faction within the CIA trying to secure his release. Finally, on March 1, 1969 he was acknowledged to be a genuine defector and formally released, whereupon he received a job with the CIA.

When his personal belongings were returned, though, his most valuable possession, a Sputnik commemorative watch, was missing. Nosenko later saw it on the wrist of a CIA doctor who had examined him.

In response to criticism about his handling of the Nosenko defection, ADDOCI Angleton responded, "The handling of Nosenko was a frolic of others".