Draft:Igor Kochnov

Igor Kochnov was a KGB officer during the Cold War. His full name was Igor Petrovich Kochnov. His parents, birthyear, and place of birth do not appear to be available in the public record, but an article at a genealogical website (Geni.com) claims that he was the partner of Svetlana Petrovna Furtseva, daughter of the Kremlin's Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Alexeyevna Furtseva.

He contacted the soon-to-be Director of CIA, Richard Helms, by telephone in June of 1966 and volunteered to spy for the CIA. Helms and the CIA's chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, believed that Kochnov was a provocation, and they decided to "play him back" as an unwitting triple-agent against the KGB.

According to several experts, including John M. Newman, Tennent H. Bagley, Mark Riebling and author Henry Hurt, Kochnov was Kremlin-loyal all along, and was instrumental in the kidnapping of Soviet navy defector Nicholas Shadrin (true name Nikolay Artamonov) in Vienna, Austria in 1975. Newman and Bagley also claim that Kochnov contributed to the continued concealment of a KGB "mole" in the CIA, and that he helped revive the sagging "bona fides" of KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko.

Kochnov and DCI Richard Helms, June 1966

In June of 1966, Kochnov, a First Chief Directorate KGB officer who was on temporary assignment at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., telephoned soon-to-be Director of CIA Richard Helms at home and said he had some information for the CIA. Helms told him that someone from the Agency would meet with him in a couple of hours, and then he quickly conferred with James Angleton and Desmond FitzGerald (CIA officer). Since Kochnov was in the U.S. at the time, they decided to inform the FBI about him, but because Angleton was convinced that the Soviet Bloc Division was penetrated by a KGB "mole," they decided to cut that division "out of the loop" and to have (witting) Bruce Solie of the Office of Security and Elbert Turner, an (unwitting) FBI agent, handle him instead.

The Shadrin Affair

Kochnov, who was given the CIA/FBI cryptonym "Kitty Hawk", met with Solie and Turner and convinced them that he wanted to spy for the U.S. while continuing to work for the KGB. He also convinced them that he had been sent to the U.S. to recruit CIA's spy, former Soviet naval captain Nicholas Shadrin (birth name Nikolay Artamonov), and to locate defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko so they could be kidnapped or killed later. Kochnov told Solie and Turner that he could expect to become head of the American component of the First Chief Directorate's (today's SVR) foreign counterintelligence section if he succeeded in either one of those two missions.

Angleton's Flawed Game

James Angleton believed that Kochnov was a KGB provocation who had been sent to the CIA to deflect attention away from a "mole" in the CIA, to convince the CIA of Nosenko's genuineness, and to find out why Nosenko, who was still undergoing detention and interrogation by Tennent H. Bagley and Murphy, had dropped from view. Angleton decided to "play" Kochnov back against the KGB in the hope that he would reveal some low-level, but still important, "intel," and that he would inadvertently signal where the "mole" was in the Soviet Bloc Division. Realizing that counterintelligence specialist Bruce Solie had never handled an agent "in the field," and that Turner, although more experienced than Solie, was accustomed to FBI rather than more-nuanced CIA handling methods and styles, Angleton was concerned that they might inadvertently tip Kochnov off to the fact that he was being played back against the Kremlin. Regardless, he decided to inform Solie, but not Turmer, of his plan. Instead, instead let Turner continue to believe that the CIA was going to help "CIA's double-agent," Kochnov, rise to a more-valuable-to-the-CIA position by having Shadrin agree to be "recruited" by him. Angleton and Helms also decided not to brief Tennent H. Bagley, Chief of Soviet Bloc Division's Counterintelligence department, about Angleton's stratagem because they were concerned that doing so would create friction between himself and his division boss, [David E. Murphy]], who couldn't be told. DCI Helms' incoming deputy, former Chief of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor, was informed about Angleton's "game," and Taylor talked his (former) Soviet destroyer captain friend, Shadrin, into pretending to be recruited by Kochnov.

Montreal 1971, Vienna 1972, and Vienna 1975

Two months after "recruiting" Shadrin and turning him over to another KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy, Kochnov returned to Moscow. Although Shadrin fed him CIA-approved "throw-away" intel for several years, Kochnov was never officially seen again. Angleton warned Shadrin's handlers to not let him leave the country for fear of being kidnapped or killed, but in 1971 he travelled to Montreal to meet with the KGB and then safely returned to the U.S. In 1972, Shadrin travelled to Vienna for another meeting with the KGB, and that trip was also uneventful. At some point after that Shadrin allegedly asked Kochnov for a meeting in Europe, and Kochnov eventually agreed to meet with him in Vienna. Shadrin, his wife, and his three handlers -- Records and Reports officer Leonard V. McCoy (who had replaced Solie as Shadrin's CIA handler so that Solie could concentrate on Kochnov), Soviet Russia Division Counterintelligence officer, McCoy's former colleague in the Records and Reports section, Cynthia Hausmann, and FBI agent Elbert Turner -- journeyed to the Austrian capital so that he could secretly meet with Kochnov despite Angleton's warning to not allow him to travel outside the U.S. Shadrin returned from the first meeting, but never returned from the second one a couple of nights later. Former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin later said he had personally witnessed the kidnapping and saw Shadrin die as a result of being given too much chloroform to render him unconscious.

Aftermath

A significant amount of criticism was leveled at McCoy and Hausmann after Shadrin disappeared, mainly for having allowed him to travel to Vienna to meet with Kochnov and for not employing counter-surveillance during the meetings.

An Interesting Anomaly

When KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in December of 1961, he warned James Angleton that there was a KGB "mole" in the Agency who had been stationed in Germany. He said that the mole had the code name "Sasha," and a Slavic-sounding name that started with "K" and ended in "-sky" or "-ski".

When "KGB Major" Yuri Nosenko "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in mid-1962 and was asked by Bagley and George Kisevalter if he knew anything about "Sasha," he said he didn't. After Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. in February 1964, however, he volunteered to Bagley and Kisevalter that "Sasha" was a "U.S. Army captain in Germany," which information, Bagley says in his book "Spy Wars," wasn't enough for the CIA to identify him.

Bagley, Newton S. Miler (Angleton's deputy), and former Assistant Deputy Director of Counterintelligence for the FBI, James E. Nolan, Jr., believed Kochnov spuriously boosted his own and Nosenko's "bona fides" by helping the CIA identify the wrong "mole" as Nosenko's "Sasha" -- U.S. Army Major Alexandr "Sasha" Sogolow -- while simultaneously deflecting attention away from Golitsyn's ostensibly more important "Sasha" -- Alexander "Sasha" Kopatzky, aka Igor Orlov -- who had worked for Sogolow in Germany, and who, upon hearing in late 1960 that Golitsyn had defected, pointed a guilty finger at Sogolow in order to save his own skin.

Although Bruce Solie of the mole-hunting Office of Security had eventually correctly identified Golitsyn's "Sasha" as Orlov in 1965, Orlov had retired from the CIA in 1961.

More on Bruce Solie

A few years ago, researcher John M. Newman came upon some of Bruce Solie's old travel records that had been posted on a well-known genealogical website in 2010. He was told by his publisher that the documents were too faint to be put in his new book, so he put them on his website, instead. Some of these travel records strongly suggest that Solie secretly met with KGB mole Kim Philby in Beirut, Lebanon, in early 1957, and others, given the context of what was going on at the time in the KGB-versus-CIA war at in Washington, D.C. and in Geneva, Switzerland, strongly suggest that Solie met with some high-level KGB "moles" in Paris, France in the spring of 1962, and with a high-level KGB officer by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal there in June of that year. For these reasons and many others, Newman believes Solie was a KGB mole in the CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security. Former CIA counterintelligence officer Bagley, who died in February 2014, wrote scathingly about Solie in his 2007 book "Spy Wars," pointing out that Solie in 1968 was instrumental in clearing Bagley's former charge, putative KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, and in clearing the way for him to be hired by the agency a few years later to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits. The frontispiece of Newman's book, which is dedicated to Bagley, quotes Bagley as saying, "Let's put Solie on the short list" for the never-uncovered KGB "mole". British researcher Malcolm Blunt, who befriended Bagley in 2008, talks about Solie in this regard in his September 10, 2021, YouTube interview on Yuri Nosenko.