A cold-war case of CIA detention still echoes
The Yuri Nosenko affair unveiled US use of extreme isolation to try to 'break' the KGB defector.
from the January 8, 2008 edition
Page 4 of 4
Nosenko told CIA employees in his 1998 speech that one way he survived the mental strain of isolation was by keeping his mind active. Twice he created a chess set out of threads pulled from his clothes. Twice the guards confiscated it. Once he found a piece of paper in a toothpaste box listing ingredients. Excited to have something to read, he tried to position himself away from the TV camera so the guards wouldn't see that he was reading. They confiscated that, too, he said in the speech.
When his mind began to deteriorate, Nosenko said he fought back by yelling and complaining. Finally, his jailers gave him a blanket. Later they let him go outside into a small exercise cage where he could see the sky.
At one point, he said, he was given LSD and it almost killed him. The guards revived him by dragging him into the shower and alternating the water between hot and cold.
Former CIA Director Helms told a congressional hearing in 1978 that a request had been made to use certain drugs against Nosenko to make him talk. He said he refused to allow it. In contrast, Turner wrote in his 1985 book "Secrecy and Democracy" that Nosenko was administered drugs on 17 occasions in an attempt to make him talk.
Turner ordered an investigation of the Nosenko matter and released its findings to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Included was a memo written one month before Nosenko was placed in isolation. It outlined a plan for "hostile interrogation." It noted: "Subject must be broken at some point if we are to learn something of the full scope of the KGB plan."
CIA investigators also recovered notes said to have been written near the end of the detention, outlining possible ways to end and cover up the Nosenko affair. The objective: "to liquidate & insofar as possible to clean up traces of a sitn in which CIA cd be accused of illegally holding Nosenko." Among the options were to "liquidate the man," "render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug etc.)," and "commitment to loony bin w/out making him nuts."
In his 2007 book "Spy Wars," former CIA officer Tennent Bagley acknowledges that he wrote the notes but says he had no murderous intent. He says in his book that he was merely "giving vent to frustration in the way a baseball fan might shout, 'Kill the umpire!' " Suggestions of killing Nosenko or rendering him crazy were "impossible and impractical," he writes. He still believes Nosenko was a Soviet plant, decades after the CIA formally embraced him as a bona fide defector.
For his part, Nosenko has said that while he was angry about his treatment, he never blamed the CIA. Instead, it was a small group of CIA officers whom he calls "the ugly ones."
In his 1998 speech, Nosenko urged young intelligence officers to "never allow a repeat of such cases." Defectors should be allowed to remain free but kept under tight surveillance, he said. Locking people up under "ugly conditions" achieves nothing, he said.
Nosenko ended that speech by telling his audience that he came to the US in 1964 but that his life in America began in 1969. "I love this country," he said. "I am a very proud American."
To the chagrin of Mr. Bagley, Nosenko's former handler, they gave him a standing ovation.
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