George Kisevalter
George Kisevalter | |
---|---|
Born | St. Petersburg, Russian Empire | April 4, 1910
Died | October 1, 1997 | (aged 87)
Resting place | Arlington National Cemetery |
Occupation | CIA Operations Officer |
George Kisevalter (April 4, 1910 – October 1, 1997) was an American operations officer of the
Early life
Kisevalter was born on 4 April 1910, in
In 1915, Kisevalter's father, accompanied by his family, was sent to the
Education
In 1926 Kisevalter attended Dartmouth College to study engineering. Among his classmates was Nelson Rockefeller.[1][3]
Military and Civilian Careers Pre-CIA
Kisevalter spent much of World War II as an army officer stationed in Alaska, involved in supporting the Soviet war effort through the Lend-Lease program. His first experience with intelligence came in 1944 when, as a fluent Russian speaker, he was assigned to military intelligence in order to work on Soviet intelligence projects. Due to Kisevalter's growing expertise in Soviet matters, as well as his German language skill, he was one of the officers who interviewed Major General Reinhard Gehlen, after Gehlen had surrendered to the US military.[1] Gehlen had been Nazi Germany's chief of intelligence for the Eastern Front, and was also well versed in Soviet military and political affairs.
Kisevalter had a brief civilian agricultural career before joining the
Central Intelligence Agency
Pyotr Popov
By 1953, Kisevalter was a branch chief in the Soviet Russia Division of the
According to Kisevalter, Popov told him in April 1958 in West Berlin that he had recently overheard a drunken GRU colonel boast that the KGB knew all of the technical specifications of the top-secret
Popov was arrested by the Soviets in October 1959, and executed in May 1960.[5]
Oleg Penkovsky
In April 1961, Kisevalter became one of the case officers of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who had volunteered to spy for the CIA and MI6, but in September of that year Kisevalter was relieved of that responsibility after it was reported to his superiors that he had gone to a London pub with a younger British case officer, gotten drunk, and started telling strangers what Penkovsky had told them earlier that day.[6]
Yuri Nosenko
Kisevalter continued to be involved in agent recruitment and handling, including the case of the controversial English-speaking KGB walk-in, Yuri Nosenko. Kisevalter helped Russian-language-understanding Tennent H. Bagley interview Nosenko four times when he "walked in" to CIA in Geneva in late May, 1962. Bagley interviewed him during the first meeting, and Kisevalter flew in two days later to assist Bagley during the four remaining, secretly-tape-recorded meetings.[7] In his book, "Spy Wars, Bagley says he decided to not tell Kisevalter that he believed Nosenko was a false defector, and that during the four meeting they had with Nosenko in June of 1962, "avuncular" Kisevalter surprised him by volunteering classified information to Nosenko that Nosenko had no need to know.
Bagley and Kisevalter also interviewed Nosenko when he recontacted them in Geneva in January 1964 (two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy), saying he wanted to leave his wife and daughters behind in Moscow and physically defect to the U.S. because he feared that the KGB was "on to" his treason. He then said during that meeting that he had been the case officer of Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR. A few days later, Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he had to defect right then because he had just received a telegram from KGB headquarters ordering him to return to Moscow immediately.[8]
Although from late June 1962, on, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was a false defector and said that Nosenko nearly "broke" in front of Kisevalter and himself one day in 1964 when confronted with a particular contradiction in his "legend," Kisevalter "never accepted the case for a mole in the CIA or the argument that Nosenko was planted by the KGB".[1]
Anatoliy Golitsyn
Kisevalter also briefly dealt with KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn when he defected to the U.S. in December 1961, and he talked him out of trying to meet with President John F. Kennedy. Golitsyn warned Angleton that a KGB false defector would soon arrive to discredit what he was telling him about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of other NATO countries, and when Nosenko "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in mid-1962, Golitsyn told Angleton "this is who I warned you about." What Nosenko had told Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in 1962 so overlapped and contradicted what Golitsyn had told Angleton six months earlier that it led to his being incarcerated and subjected to harsh (but not tortuous) interrogations for three years.[9]
Other CIA
Kisevalter's final assignment before his retirement in 1970 was training new CIA operations officers. He received the CIA's highest award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. In 1997, when the CIA celebrated its 50th anniversary, Kisevalter was designated as one of its 50 Trailblazers.[1] Kisevalter was featured in William Hood's 'skillful spy novel', Mole (1983), a presumed fictional account of the Popov operation, as the case officer Gregory Domnin. According to Clarence Ashley, his friend and biographer, Kisevalter came up with that pseudonym for Hood based on his great-grandmother's maiden name, Domnina.[1]
Personal life
Kisevalter died in October 1997, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
References
- ^ a b c d e f Ashley, Clarence (2004). CIA Spymaster. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
- ^ Berlinski, Claire (December 2004). Spy vs. Spy: there's a lesson to be learned, still, from the great Cold War spy George Kisevalter. Weekly Standard.
- ^ Peake, Hayden B. "The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf Intelligence in Recent Public Literature". Archived from the original on June 13, 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
- ISBN 9798355050771.
- ISBN 9780060170370.
- ISBN 978-1-84983-929-7.
- ISBN 978-0-300-12198-8.
- ^ Bagley 2007, pp. 80–91.
- ^ Bagley 2007, pp. 177–194.