MSNBC's Rachel Maddow greeted last week's release of the so-called Senate torture report with her skewed telling of the tale of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the US and was subjected to years of harsh treatment and interrogation before the CIA concluded he was not a double agent.
As you'd expect from the marquee host at America's version of Pravda, Maddow left out a significant and embarrassing detail in her December 9 report --
Well in 1964, Yuri Nosenko finally decided to defect to the United States and that is when things started going horribly wrong because two things had happened immediately before he decided to defect. In 1963 the CIA had written itself a new interrogation manual in which they decided that they would use, basically, torture techniques as part of their interrogations. In this 1963 manual they decided they would use solitary confinement, they'd use other means of depriving people of sensory stimulus, they'd use threats, they would use fear, they would use pain, they would even use things like hypnosis and drugging people into a stupor to try to get more out of them in an interrogation. So the year before Yuri Nosenko defected, that is what the CIA adopted internally as their guidelines for interrogation. They adopted those guidelines in 1963 right before he got there.
The other thing that happened right before he got there was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The man who killed President Kennedy was Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald had spent time in the Soviet Union before killing President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. While Lee Harvey Oswald had been in the Soviet Union before that assassination, Yuri Nosenko had been one of the KGB officers who had been assigned to interview him, before the assassination when he was in Russia. Yuri Nosenko told his American handlers what he knew about Lee Harvey Oswald, told them about his contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, told them he had reviewed the Soviet files on Lee Harvey Oswald. And as the United States was, you know, frankly losing our minds, right, not only in grief and shock over this presidential assassination, but also obsessively trying to figure out if Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone at the height of the Cold War, right?
Well, here was Yuri Nosenko, brand new KGB defector, who said he had reason to know the answer to that question of whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or whether he was the agent of our great rival, the agent of this foreign power. And the information that he had was that Lee Harvey Oswald had in fact acted alone. Yes, he'd spent all that time in the Soviet Union, but Yuri Nosenko said he knew from first-hand experience that the Soviets basically thought Lee Harvey Oswald was a nut, they thought he was unstable, they thought he was just personally unfit for any kind of spy work and so they didn't put him up to anything and he acted alone.That was the story that KGB defected Yuri Nosenko brought with him to the United States in the winter of 1964. And in the winter of 1964 the CIA decided that they didn't believe him. And they had this CIA interrogation manual for how you interrogate people, this new manual, and they decided that they were going to use all of it on old Yuri Nosenko.
And so in 1964 when he was defecting, after having been an asset all those years, in 1964 they locked him up at a CIA training site near Williamsburg, Va. It's a place called Camp Peary. They put him in solitary confinement, they put him in a small concrete cell. He was left under bright uninterrupted light burning 24 hours a day. He was entirely alone, he had exactly zero contact with any other humans. He was given no sensory stimulus whatsoever except for that ever-burning bright light. He was given nothing to read, nothing to occupy his time, nothing to do. He was given purposely revolting food, what Tim Weiner in "Legacy of Ashes" describes as "weak tea and gruel" was his food.
When they finally did have any human contact it was basically to abuse him, to emotionally abuse him, to scream at him, to do repeated forcible body searches, which presumably had no functional purpose since he was 24 hours a day in solitary confinement with access to nothing in a concrete cell. But you know, forcible repeated body searches can have the knock-on effect of being humiliating and degrading and you know what? That's what the manual said would work!
So they kept Yuri Nosenko in custody in those conditions for 1,277 days. And at the end of it, the CIA concluded, after endless interrogation and endless polygraph exams, they concluded that he'd been telling the truth all along. He actually had nothing to offer that he hadn't told them not under those terrible circumstances. And so in 1967, they set him free with a new name. They let him resettle to some anonymous place in the American South.
How helpful indeed for Maddow to have cited Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA." I took the trouble to obtain a copy and was glad I did, especially when I read the parts about Nosenko --
In the spring of 1964, after years of crushing failures, (James) Angleton (chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff) sought redemption. He believed that if the CIA could break Nosenko, the master plot might be revealed -- and the Kennedy assassination solved.
... Those were the stakes. In April 1964, with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement, first in a CIA safe house, and then at Camp Peary, the CIA's training site outside Williamsburg, Virginia. In the custody of the Soviet division, Nosenko received the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag. There were scant meals of weak tea and gruel, a single bare light burning twenty-four hours a day, no human companionship. "I did not have enough to eat and was hungry all the time," Nosenko said in a statement declassified in 2001. "I had no contact with anyone to talk. I could not read. I could not smoke. I even could not have fresh air."
His testimony was remarkably similar to that of prisoners taken by the CIA after September 2001. ...
... Nosenko was subjected to psychological intimidation and physical hardship for three more years.
Notice what Maddow neglects to mention -- "with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy." And Weiner's reference to Kennedy is in the same paragraph as an excerpt cited in a pull-out quote during Maddow's report -- "Nosenko received the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag." You remember -- as approved by RFK. And somehow missed by Maddow, despite its conspicuous presence at the start of the paragraph that contains so much other information she cited.
The CIA manual mentioned by Maddow was approved in July 1963 -- while John F. Kennedy was still president. And even though Robert Kennedy ended his work as attorney general after he was elected to the US Senate in 1964, Nosenko's brutal treatment continued for three more years while another iconic Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, was president.
Also worth noting is Maddow's curiously sterile take on Oswald having "spent time" in the Soviet Union before Kennedy's assassination. That's one way of describing it. What, like in a time share? More specifically, Oswald, an avowed communist, had defected -- which you'd think might warrant mention in a story about a KGB agent who did the same in the other direction.
Oswald's defection, eventual return to the US, and visit to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City only two months before the Kennedy assassination helps explain why CIA officials were so skeptical about Nosenko when he fled from Russia in 1964. They'd already gotten burned by one defector and weren't about to let it happen again.
While it's certainly refreshing to see another liberal resign herself to awkward fact that Oswald killed Kennedy, notice also how Maddow can't bring herself to mention his politics. Something tells me she wouldn't be nearly so reticent had Oswald been a Bircher.
