Draft:Bruce Leonard Solie

Bruce Leonard Solie was a commendation-garnering, career-long officer in the CIA's mole-hunting Office of Security who was best known for his exoneration of controversial KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, his uncovering of Igor Orlov -- Igor Orlov (alias) -- as Anatoliy Golitsyn's "mole," "Sasha," and his involvement in the tragic Nicholas Shadrin case. In addition to effectively being CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's mole-hunting superior, Solie was, like Kim Philby, his highly trusted confidant and mentor.

Solie was described by former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley as being "dour, plodding, risk-averse, and ultra-cautious ... a country boy made good", and by espionage writer David Wise as "given to long pauses between sentences." Former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and NSA officer John M. Newman, however, believes Solie sent (or duped James Angleton into sending) President John F. Kennedy's accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail hunt for a KGB "mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA.

Bagley, who was Nosenko's primary case officer for five years, wrote scathingly about Solie in his book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games," and came to suspect near the end of his life that he was a KGB "mole." He suggested that Solie be "put on the short list" for suspected CIA traitors because he had inexplicably provided "rock-like protection" for Nosenko over the years and Solie's sister-in-law had married the ostensible KGB defector.

Newman and his British colleague, Malcolm Blunt (who befriended Bagley in 2008), contend that Solie probably was a KGB "mole" at the heart of the CIA.

Solie's Supporters
At the time of the writing of this article (January 2024), no espionage writer or former intelligence agent has attempted to rebut Blunt's (September 2021) or Newman's (October 2022) evidence (or Bagley's 2014 suspicion) that Solie was a KGB "mole." Lots of experts in the past have, however, sided with Solie in his assessment that Nosenko was a true defector and/or that Igor Kochnov was a really spying for the U.S. and/or that "Popov's Mole" was ensconced somewhere in the Soviet Russia Division and/or that Aleksei Kulak (FEDORA) was really spying for the FBI, etc. Among these experts are former CIA officers like Leonard V. McCoy, John L. Hart, George Kisevalter, Cleveland Cram,Richards Heuer, and espionage writers like Tom Mangold, David Wise (journalist), and Jefferson Morley.

Background
Solie was born to a dairy farmer and his wife in Wisconsin on November 12th, 1917, and he died on December 23rd, 1992. He became a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, served as an Air Force navigator in the European theater during World War II, and met his future wife (Mary Elizabeth Matthews) at Rosecrans Field (known today as Rosecrans Air National Guard Base) in St. Joseph, Missouri. They were married on February 22, 1944, and lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and Homestead, Florida, until Solie was stationed overseas as a bomber pilot. They eventually had a son and two daughters. At the conclusion of WW II, they moved to "Badger Village," a housing facility devised to handle the influx of WWII veterans attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from which school he earned degrees in economics and law. In 1951 they relocated to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he began a career with the CIA which lasted until his retirement in 1979.

Travel Records
Newman found some of Solie's travel records around 2017 which had been posted on a genealogical website in 2010. Since he was told that they were too faint to be published, they weren't included in his 2022 book, "Uncovering Popov's Mole," but were put his on his website, instead. https://jfkjmn.com/ (Click on "Uncovering Popov's Mole -- Supplement") They indicate that Solie, not known to have been on official business at the time, flew to Beirut, Lebanon, in February of 1957, six months after the British traitor Kim Philby had moved there, and that he visited Paris twice within one month in 1962 -- the first time just before Nosenko walked into the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland, and the second time on the same day that Solie had asked Nosenko questions in Geneva through Bagley and his other handler, George Kisevalter. Newman believes Solie visited Philby in Beirut in 1957 to learn from him how to control Angleton, and that his close-together visits to Paris in May-June 1962 were in the first instance to meet with some KGB "moles" in French intelligence and a high-level KGB officer from Moscow by the name of Mikhail Tsymbal so that they could convey to Nosenko's case officer in Moscow, Oleg Gribanov, what a recent true-defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling Angleton (and Angleton was confiding to Solie) about possible KGB penetrations of U.S and other NATO countries' intelligence services. Newman believes Solie's second visit Paris was to inform those same French "moles" and Tsymbal (who traveled from Geneva to Paris in parallel with Solie both times) what he had learned about Bagley's and Kisevalter's interactions with Nosenko in Geneva.

Popov's Mole / The Lee Harvey Oswald Defection Case
In April of 1958, GRU Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov told his CIA handler, George Kisevalter, in West Berlin that he had recently heard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin knew all of the technical specifications of the CIA's Lockheed U-2 spy plane. According to Newman, Solie and his mole-hunting subordinate, CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, decided to initiate a top-secret search for the leaker of the intel, and sent former Marine radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald (who had served at a U-2 base in Japan) to Moscow in late 1959 as a "dangle" in a search for the mole whom Solie said must be in the Soviet Russia Division. Newman eventually realized that all of the incoming non-CIA cables about Oswald's 31 October defection had been arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics to be routed to Solie's mole-hunting Staff Research Branch office in the Office of Security rather than where they would have normally gone, the Soviet Russia Division. This led Newman to conclude that Solie must have known ahead of time that Oswald was going to defect to the USSR, which in turn forced him to conclude that Solie was a KGB "mole," and that he had sent Oswald to Moscow on a planned-to-fail mole hunt.

Solie Apparently Hid Information on Oswald's Defection From the FBI
Although the CIA had received a cable about Oswald's defection from the Department of the Navy on 4 November 1959, Solie, when asked on that date by the FBI's liaison to the CIA, Sam Papich, if the Agency knew anything about Oswald, wrote to Angleton's Counterintelligence liaison, "Mr. Papich was advised that we had no info on subject."

The Sasha Case
KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the U.S. in Helsinki, Finland. Four days after he arrived in the U.S., he told Solie that, based on what he had surreptitiously read in a KGB file in Moscow ten years earlier, there was a "mole" in the CIA whose codename was "Sasha" (the Slavic nickname for "Alexander"), that he had served in U.S. Intelligence in West Germany, that his name started with a "K" and ended in "-ski" or "-sky," and that he had leaked information about the development of a top-secret CIA listening device. Solie showed Golitsyn a list of CIA agents and officers whose name started with a "K" and ended with a Slavic suffix like "-ski" or "-sky." The list evidently didn't include the name Alexander Kopatzky, an earlier name of Igor Orlov, a Russia-born CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in West Germany after WW II, and whose agents were often uncovered by the KGB in the USSR, so Golitsyn chose the name "Peter Klibanski" (the original name of Peter Karlow) from the list, instead. Karlow, who was already under suspicion of being a "mole" because he had directed the leak-plagued top-secret Easy Chair electronic-listening project and had managed some agents who had been caught by the KGB, was summarily fired from the CIA. Karlow was later cleared of suspicion of being "Sasha" and financially compensated for his troubles. The aforementioned Igor Orlov / Alexander "Sasha" Kopatzky, who had been forced to retire from the CIA in 1961 when he and his wife moved to the U.S., was eventually deemed by Solie, in 1965, to be Golitsyn's mole, "Sasha," and this identification was confirmed by controversial KGB defector Igor Kochnov in 1966, thereby enhancing both his and Solie's reputations with the CIA and the FBI.

The Yuri Nosenko Case
In late May or early June (accounts vary) of 1962, putative KGB officer Yuri Nosenko "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva, Switzerland and offered to exchange some KGB intelligence for $250 of "desperately needed" funds. Tennent H. Bagley flew in from Bern and met with Nosenko one-on-one in a CIA "safe house," and they were joined two days later by Russia-born agent-handler George Kisevalter. There were five meetings altogether, and during the final one on 15 June, Solie showed up unannounced, hoping to show Nosenko a list of suspected "moles" in the CIA. Kisevalter and Bagley, who had already become Nosenko's primary case officer, didn't allow Solie to meet face-to-face with Nosenko, but did let him sit in the next room and pass questions to him. Bagley said in his book that Nosenko "drew a blank" on all of the names and code names that were presented to him, and that he, Bagley, later learned that the names were leads recent KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had given to the CIA. Solie flew to Paris for the second time in six months that same day, and Nosenko, who was ostensibly serving as the security officer for a Soviet arms negotiation delegation, flew back to Moscow with it the next day.

Nosenko recontacted Bagley and Kisevalter in Geneva in late January 1964, two months after the assassination of JFK. Nosenko told Bagley and Kisevalter that he wanted to physically defect to the U.S., now (and leave his previously-beloved wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves ), because he suspected that the KGB was aware of his treason. Nosenko then claimed that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in the USSR, and that he therefore knew for a fact that the KGB hadn't even interviewed the "abnormal" former Marine radar operator during the two-and-one-half-years he lived there. When he told Bagley and Kisevalter a few days later that he had just received a recall telegram from Moscow, CIA headquarters gave Bagley and Kisevalter permission to take him to Frankfurt, West Germany so that he could be processed for possible entry into the U.S. Once Nosenko was actually in the U.S., he refused to cooperate fully with his Agency debriefers. After being taken by Bagley to Hawaii on a two-week vacation, Nosenko was detained in April in a Maryland "safe house" by the CIA and subjected to a polygraph exam and hostile interrogations.

That same month, April 1964, Solie tried to convince Warren Commission investigator W. David Slawson that Nosenko had given contradictory information to his debriefers because he had been drunk at his five 1962 meetings in Geneva, because there had been a severe language problem between Nosenko and Bagley, and because Nosenko was under intense stress in the U.S. British researcher Malcolm Blunt, who befriended Bagley in 2008, says Bagley was astounded when Blunt showed him some documents which suggested Solie had tried to convince Slawson that Nosenko was a true defector. According to Blunt, Bagley insisted that April 1964 was much too early for Solie to have arrived at that conclusion.

For security reasons, Nosenko was moved from the residential-area "safe house" to a more austere, bunker-like building that was built especially for him at Camp Peary, and he was subjected there to his second polygraph exam and two more years of hostile interrogations.

In 1967, Solie was given the task of conducting a new, independent investigation to determine whether or not still-incarcerated Nosenko was a true defector. To do this, he moved Nosenko into a more comfortable "safe house," and proceeded to elicit possible explanations from him that could make more plausible his previous contradictory statements. A year later, after administering a final polygraph exam to Nosenko (which polygraph expert Robert O. Arther later read at CIA headquarters and said was unreliable ) Solie, contradicting the negative assessment of Nosenko by the Soviet Russia Division's condensation of Bagley's 840-page report, concluded in his own report that Nosenko was a true defector. This conclusion was quickly accepted by CIA leadership, and Nosenko was released, "cleared," financially compensated, resettled under a new name, and hired by the CIA to teach counterintelligence to its new recruits.

The Shadrin Affair
In June of 1966, shortly before he assumed the position of Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms received a phone call at home from Washington-based KGB officer Igor Kochnov. Kochnov told Helms he was willing to spy for the CIA on the condition that the Agency helped boost his status in Moscow by pretending to turn over to him Nicholas Shadrin (original name Artamonov), a former Soviet destroyer captain who had defected to the U.S. several years earlier. Helms and Angleton, believing Kochnov to be a "plant" and still fearing that the Soviet Russia Division was penetrated by a KGB "mole," decided to "play" Kochnov back against the Soviets. Angleton and Helms didn't tell anyone in the Soviet Russia Division that they were doing so and turned Kochnov over to unwitting(?) Solie from the Office of Security and an unwitting FBI agent by the name of Albert "Bert" Turner for handling. Before Kochnov returned to Moscow a few months later, he passed Shadrin off to another KGB officer at the Soviet embassy. Angleton, fearing that he would be kidnapped or killed by the KGB, warned Shadrin's handlers to not let him leave the country, but they soon allowed him to travel to Canada (because Kochnov allegedly beckoned him there as a test of the CIA's sincerity), and in 1975 they permitted Shadrin and his wife to travel to Vienna, Austria, so that he could meet with Kochnov. Due to their failure to provide counter-surveillance for the meeting, Shadrin was kidnapped by the KGB in Vienna and died, according to Oleg Kalugin, when he was given too much of a "knock out" drug.

The Clay Shaw Trial
In a 2022 YouTube video in which researcher Malcolm Blunt is interviewed about Yuri Nosenko, Blunt says Solie was omnipresent in the JFK assassination investigation, and that he was "all over" Clay Shaw for New Orlean's District Attorney Jim Garrison.