Dead Celebrity Alert

October 30, 1927 - August 23, 2008

The controversial defection of the Soviet agent Yuri Nosenko to the United States contributed to deep and demoralising divisions within the CIA and the ultimate dismissal of James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s chief of counter-intelligence.

Nosenko joined the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate in 1953 and was responsible for the surveillance and recruitment of foreigners in Moscow. In the 1960s he offered to provide the West with details of Soviet penetration agents and, later, information about the KGB connection with Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy.

His defection was initially viewed as a CIA coup, but it came at a time when the agency was gripped with spy fever, stoked by Angleton, and fears that the CIA had been penetrated by a Soviet mole in its highest ranks. … Read full obituary

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