Dr. Tennent Bagley, retired CIA counterintelligence officer and author of Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (Yale University Press, 2007), spoke to a capacity crowd at The Institute of World Politics on October 30, 2007, delivering a fascinating account of his personal involvement with the highly controversial Yuri Nosenko defection case.   

In 1962, Dr. Bagley became the first CIA officer to have contact with Nosenko, when the alleged defector indicated his interest in working with the American intelligence agency.  Much of Dr. Bagley’s later counterintelligence career was also involved with the Nosenko case, particularly concerning the question of whether or not Nosenko was a KGB “plant” to protect Soviet assets within the CIA.  Although the truth about the Nosenko case is still elusive, Dr. Bagley left no doubt that its consequences make it one of the foremost counterintelligence cases in U.S. history. 

His lecture was part of IWP Adjunct Professor Brian Kelley’s class “Case Studies in Counterintelligence Operations,” but was attended by other IWP students as well as by alumni, faculty, and guests.   

Dr. Jim Bruce, a RAND Corporation political scientist and retired CIA officer, introduced Dr. Bagley and provided background information on key aspects of intelligence epistemology as they are related to the Nosenko case.