Anatoliy Golitsyn

Golitsyn said that Harold Wilson (then prime minister of the United Kingdom) was a KGB informer and an agent of influence. This encouraged pre-existing conspiracy theories within the British security services concerning Wilson.[2][10] During his time as president of the Board of Trade in the late 1940s, Wilson had been on trade missions to Russia and cultivated a friendship with Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov. He continued these relationships when Labour went into Opposition, and according to material from the Mitrokhin Archive, his insights into British politics were passed to and highly rated by the KGB. An "agent development file" was opened in the hope of recruiting Wilson, and the codename "OLDING" was given to him. However "the development did not come to fruition," according to the KGB file records.[2]

Golitsyn also accused the KGB of poisoning Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson's predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, in order for Wilson to take over the party. Gaitskell died after a sudden attack of lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disorder, in 1963. Golitsyn's claims about Wilson were believed in particular by the senior MI5 counterintelligence officer Peter Wright.[11] Although Wilson was repeatedly investigated by MI5 and cleared of this accusation, individuals within the service continued to believe that he was an agent of the KGB, and this belief played a part in coup plots against him.[12]

Golitsyn said after his defection that the Note Crisis of 1961 was an operation masterminded by Finnish president Urho Kekkonen together with the Soviets to ensure Kekkonen's re-election. Golitsyn further said that Kekkonen had been a KGB agent codenamed "Timo" since 1947. Most Finnish historians believe that Kekkonen was closely connected with the KGB, but the matter remains controversial.[13]

Golitsyn had said from the very beginning that the KGB would send a false defector to the US to try to discredit him. In January 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a putative KGB officer who had defected "in place" to the CIA in 1962 in Geneva, returned there as the ostensible security officer of a Soviet arms control delegation, and, as promised, recontacted his CIA case officers, Tennent H. Bagley and Russian-born George Kisevalter.[14] Nosenko told them that he now wanted to physically defect to the US (and leave his wife and two daughters behind in Moscow) because he feared that the KGB was aware of his treason. Bagley, having read Golitsyn's CIA file in late June 1962, knew that what Nosenko had told him and Kisevalter in early June 1962 about KGB penetrations of Western intelligence services overlapped (and contradicted) what Golitsyn had told the CIA six months earlier. Bagley thought this was very strange because Nosenko and Golitsyn had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB and therefore would not have been privy to the same information. Bagley also did not believe that the KGB would have allowed Nosenko to travel to Geneva if it suspected him of spying for the CIA. For these and other reasons, Bagley suspected Nosenko of being a false defector.

When Nosenko told Kisevalter and Bagley that he wanted to physically defect to the US, Bagley, who was Nosenko's primary case officer, suggested to him that he wait a few days while headquarters prepared everything for him, and Nosenko agreed. Two developments, however, hastened the process: Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter during that same meeting that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in the USSR, and a few days later he told them excitedly that he had just received a telegram from Moscow ordering him to return immediately (NSA later said that no such telegram had been sent). In short, Nosenko was allowed to physically defect to the US (after being flown to Frankfurt and interviewed there by the Soviet Russia Division chief, David Murphy, because he claimed to have been privy to Oswald's KGB file both before and after the assassination.

Judging it improbable that the KGB had not, as Nosenko claimed, interviewed former Marine radar operator Oswald, and faced with further challenges to Nosenko's credibility (e.g., originally telling Bagley in 1962 that he was a major, then in January 1964 boasting -- with a KGB travel document that stated as much -- that he had recently been promoted to lieutenant-colonel, but eventually confessing to having been only a captain), Angleton did not object when Murphy and Bagley detained Nosenko in April of 1964. This confinement lasted sixteen months and involved austere living conditions, a minimal (but adequate) diet, and interrogations that were frequent and intensive. Nosenko spent an additional four months in a ten-foot by ten-foot concrete bunker in Camp Peary,[6] and was allegedly told that this arrangement would continue for 25 years unless he confessed to being a Soviet spy.[15]

During the three years Nosenko was detained and interrogated by the CIA, he was given three polygraph tests. According to Gerald Posner (who befriended Nosenko in 1993), he failed the first two (1964 and 1966) while under great duress, but passed the third one in 1968, which was "monitored by several Agency departments."[16] However, Nosenko's long-term CIA case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, says in his 2007 book Spy Wars that Bruce Solie of the Office of Security (whom Professor John M. Newman believes was a KGB mole[17]) "coached" Nosenko through the easy third test, and polygraph expert Richard D. Arthur said that of the three tests, the second one (which Nosenko had failed) was by far the most reliable one.

In October of 1968, Nosenko was virtually cleared by Bruce Solie via the aforementioned polygraph test and a report he had written, and a few years later the CIA declared Nosenko to be a true defector and hired him to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.[6]

In 1984, Golitsyn published the book New Lies For Old,[18] wherein he warned about a long-term deception strategy of seeming retreat from hard-line Communism designed to lull the West into a false sense of security, and finally economically cripple and diplomatically isolate the United States. Among other things, Golitsyn stated:

The "liberalization" would be spectacular and impressive. Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the communist party's role: its monopoly would be apparently curtailed. An ostensible separation of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary might be introduced. The Supreme Soviet would be given greater apparent power, and the president of the Soviet Union and the first secretary of the party might well be separated. The KGB would be "reformed." Dissidents at home would be amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to return, and some would take up positions of leadership in government.

Sakharov might be included in some capacity in the government or allowed to teach abroad. The creative arts and cultural and scientific organizations, such as the writers' unions and Academy of Sciences, would become apparently more independent, as would the trade unions. Political clubs would be opened to nonmembers of the communist party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative political parties.

There would be greater freedom for Soviet citizens to travel. Western and United Nations observers would be invited to the Soviet Union to witness the reforms in action.[19]

Angleton and Golitsyn reportedly sought the assistance of William F. Buckley, Jr. (who once worked for the CIA) in writing New Lies for Old. Buckley refused but later went on to write a novel about Angleton, Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton.[20]

New Lies for Old received a first edition in Portuguese in 2018.[21][22]

In 1995, Anatoliy Golitsyn and Christopher Story published a book entitled The Perestroika Deception containing purported memoranda attributed to Golitsyn claiming:

• "The [Soviet] strategists are concealing the secret coordination that exists and will continue between Moscow and the 'nationalist' leaders of [the] 'independent' republics."
• "The power of the KGB remains as great as ever… Talk of cosmetic changes in the KGB and its supervision is deliberately publicized to support the myth of 'democratization' of the Soviet political system."
• "Scratch these new, instant Soviet 'democrats,' 'anti-Communists,' and 'nationalists' who have sprouted out of nowhere, and underneath will be found secret Party members or KGB agents."