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CIA Torture: Old Cold War Case of Russian Defector Yuri Nosenko
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[The story of Nosenko is alluded to (but not accurately ****trayed) in
recent fictional films about the CIA's sordid history. Not told in
this article, which parrots the "harsh interrogation" euphemism (mustn't
call it "torture") are other stories of torture in which the victims
were less exotic -- Vietnamese and Guatemalan peasants, Nicaraguans,
Cuban revolutionaries, Iranian opponents of the USA's Shah, Chileans,
Catholic nuns and liberation theology laypeople, etc. etc. etc. -NYTr]
Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo - Jan 8, 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080108/ts_csm/anosenko
A cold-war case of CIA detention still echoes
By Warren Richey
Behind the debate over the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction of
videotapes depicting waterboarding and other harsh interrogation
techniques lies a fundamental question: Can government officials use
such aggressive tactics without violating US law?
No American court has yet ruled on the legality of Bush administration
interrogation policies. But the war on terror isn't the first time US
officials have used harsh methods to try to "break" a detainee.
>From 1964 to 1967, Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko was subjected to
extreme isolation and sensory deprivation and was administered drugs
because his CIA handlers believed he was still working in secret for
the KGB. They imprisoned him in a windowless concrete cell to try to
disrupt him psychologically and force him to confess his loyalty to
Moscow, according to CIA do***ents and a congressional investigation.
He never did.
The case has been examined in several books " one was published last
year " and a 1986 movie depicting the intense debate over whether Mr.
Nosenko was an actual defector. Lost in much of the discussion has been
the legality of his treatment.
"It was reprehensible," says Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA from
1977 to 1981 and ordered an internal examination of the Nosenko affair
in 1977. "I was aghast when I uncovered it."
Nosenko's experience in CIA custody in the 1960s is relevant today
because of similarities between his harsh treatment and the use of some
of the same techniques now, more than 40 years later, against suspected
Islamic terrorists. Among them are three men who were held at the
military brig in Charleston, S.C., after being designated as enemy
combatants by President Bush.
Like Nosenko, all three men " Yasser Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh
al-Marri " were held in isolation cells in the United States with
minimal human contact for three years or more in an attempt to force
confessions by disrupting their ability to maintain rational thought,
according to interrogation specialists and mental-health experts.
Although the US Supreme Court in 2004 upheld the president's authority
to order the military detention of enemy combatants, no US judge has
ever ruled on the legality of using severe isolation as an
interrogation technique. It remains unresolved even as the Supreme
Court weighs the legal rights of foreign terror detainees at the US
naval base in Guant!namo Bay, Cuba, and as the Justice Department
undertakes a criminal investigation of the CIA's destruction of tapes
do***enting the use of harsh interrogation methods.
Now 80, Nosenko lives in the US under an assumed name. He was contacted
by the Monitor through an intermediary but declined to be interviewed
for this story.
An 'increasingly concerned' CIAOne indication of the CIA's own
*****sment of the legality of Nosenko's treatment was revealed last
June, when the agency released do***ents concerning some of its
once-secret operations.
"This office [CIA's Office of Security] together with the [CIA's]
Office of General Counsel became increasingly concerned with the
illegality of the agency's position in handling a defector [Nosenko]
under these conditions for such a long period of time," states a memo
dated 16 May 1973, nearly six years after Nosenko was released.
The memo is in sharp contrast to the 1978 congressional testimony of
former CIA Director Richard Helms, who ran the agency at the end of
Nosenko's detention. He was asked who gave legal authorization for the
CIA to hold a KGB defector in an isolation cell for 1,277 days with no
charges filed and no access to a lawyer or the courts. Mr. Helms said
then-Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had authorized it. But
Mr. Katzenbach told the congressional panel that he would never have
given such legal advice.
In a recent telephone interview, Katzenbach said the CIA never shared
with him any details of Nosenko's treatment. "All they were talking
about was the amount of time he was being held, which was harsh," he
says.
Katzenbach, who later served as attorney general in the Johnson
administration, says the intelligence agency was operating under its
own rules. "The CIA had no authority to question anybody any
differently than the FBI or the local police force," he says.
The legality of Nosenko's treatment in the 1960s was never tested in
court in part because Nosenko later waived his right to sue the US
government over his detention and treatment. After his release, the
agency declared Nosenko a bona fide defector, paid him $175,000, and
hired him for $35,000 a year as a consultant. In 1974, he became a US
citizen.
As with the Nosenko affair, the US government is working to avoid
judicial scrutiny of interrogations of terror suspects. Former enemy
combatant Yasser Hamdi was released in 2004 and is now living freely in
Saudi Arabia after signing an agreement not to sue the US government
over his treatment.
In contrast, lawyers working on behalf of the other two Charleston
detainees, Mr. Padilla and Mr. Marri, have filed civil lawsuits
claiming their clients were tortured in the military prison. Lawyers
for Padilla also filed a second suit Friday in San Francisco against
former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. The suit says Mr. Yoo was a
legal architect of the Bush administration's harsh interrogation
policies that were "intended to destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary
emotional and cognitive functioning ... to extract from him potentially
self-incriminating information."
Padilla has been diagnosed with significant mental disabilities
stemming from his three years and seven months in the Charleston brig.
He was convicted last summer in a terror conspiracy trial in Miami. On
Tuesday, a federal judge begins a week-long hearing to consider whether
Padilla should receive a more lenient sentence because of his harsh
treatment at the brig. Federal prosecutors want Padilla sentenced to
life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Marri remains in an isolation cell at the brig, but his conditions of
confinement have eased since 2005. A federal appeals court in Richmond,
Va., is currently examining the constitutionality of Marri's detention,
though not the legality of the interrogation techniques used against
him. A ruling is expected soon.
One common thread running through all four men's stories is a perceived
need by the government to quickly extract information deemed essential
to protect US national security.
"One of the difficulties with this kind of issue is that it is a
slippery slope," says Katzenbach. "If you can put somebody in isolation
for 24 hours, why not 48, why not a week?"
Mr. Turner agrees. "There is a very tough line here. What if you really
think that by torturing somebody you are going to prevent a major
catastrophe?" he asks. "My inclination is that you have to stick by
your moral principles and put constitutional rights of individuals
first regardless of the cir***stance." But the former CIA director says
the US government should not rule out any particular technique or
tactic, nor should it adopt procedures automatically allowing such
tactics.
A real defector from the Soviet KGB?In the Nosenko case, the stakes
were enormous, coming at the height of the cold war. Nosenko's
interrogation began in April 1964 after a group of CIA officials became
suspicious that Nosenko might not be a genuine defector. They thought
he was sent by the KGB to throw the CIA off the trail of Soviet moles
who they feared had penetrated America's spy network. In addition, they
thought he was sent by Moscow to insulate the KGB from any connection
to Lee Harvey Oswald. Mr. Oswald assassinated President John Kennedy in
November 1963.
Nosenko was held for three years in extreme isolation, first in a
locked attic room in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Md. Later he was
transferred to a specially built windowless concrete cell at Camp
Peary, the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, Va.
He was questioned and requestioned about whether the KGB had ever
approached Oswald during the three years Oswald lived in the Soviet
Union prior to the Kennedy assassination. Nosenko said he had
personally reviewed Oswald's KGB file and that, while the KGB had
conducted surveillance of Oswald, it had never tried to recruit him.
This issue was critical because KGB involvement with Oswald might
suggest Soviet involvement in the Kennedy assassination " a prospect
that could have propelled the cold war into a nuclear war.
Nosenko insisted that Oswald was a "nut" and that the Soviets had
deemed him unsuitable for intelligence work.
Some CIA officials were sure Nosenko was lying and was part of a larger
Soviet operation. But how to make him talk? He was a trained KGB
officer who knew how to resist interrogation.
According to a CIA internal investigation, agents decided to use the
Soviet Union's own techniques against him. They treated him precisely
as the KGB had treated Yale University professor Frederick Barghoorn,
who had been arrested in Moscow on trumped-up spy charges to set up a
potential swap for a genuine Soviet spy nabbed in New York. The KGB
held the professor for 16 days in October 1963 before the intervention
of his friend, President Kennedy, won his release.
Isolation to 'break' NosenkoNosenko's cell built at Camp Peary
contained a metal bed bolted to the floor, a foam mattress, one light
bulb, and a television camera. There were no windows. No sheets or
blankets. No reading material. Just four soundproof, concrete walls " a
replica of a Soviet detention cell.
"To say it was a nightmare is not enough. It was hell," Nosenko told
CIA employees in a 1998 speech.
The guards were instructed not to speak with him or acknowledge his
presence. They watched him via television 24 hours a day.
Such conditions of confinement are described in a 1956 US
government-funded secret re****t titled "Communist Control Techniques."
It discusses how the Soviets used prolonged isolation and sensory
deprivation to drive detainees to the brink of insanity and condition
them to confess. Isolation can work as a kind of tightening vise on the
psyche, according to the re****t. Prison guards estimated that the
average detainee "broke" in four to six weeks.
By then, a detainee loses "many of the restraints of ordinary
behavior," the re****t says. "He may soil himself. He weeps, he mutters,
and he prays aloud in his cell. He follows the orders of the guard with
the docility of a trained animal. Indeed, the guards say that such
prisoners are 'reduced to animals.' "
But there are exceptions. "Those convinced of their innocence and
familiar with KGB methods may be able to stand up under isolation for a
long time," the re****t says.
Nosenko told CIA employees in his 1998 speech that one way he survived
the mental strain of isolation was by keeping his mind active. Twice he
created a chess set out of threads pulled from his clothes. Twice the
guards confiscated it. Once he found a piece of paper in a toothpaste
box listing ingredients. Excited to have something to read, he tried to
position himself away from the TV camera so the guards wouldn't see
that he was reading. They confiscated that, too, he said in the speech.
When his mind began to deteriorate, Nosenko said he fought back by
yelling and complaining. Finally, his jailers gave him a blanket. Later
they let him go outside into a small exercise cage where he could see
the sky.
At one point, he said, he was given LSD and it almost killed him. The
guards revived him by dragging him into the shower and alternating the
water between hot and cold.
Former CIA Director Helms told a congressional hearing in 1978 that a
request had been made to use certain drugs against Nosenko to make him
talk. He said he refused to allow it. In contrast, Turner wrote in his
1985 book "Secrecy and Democracy" that Nosenko was administered drugs
on 17 occasions in an attempt to make him talk.
Turner ordered an investigation of the Nosenko matter and released its
findings to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Included was
a memo written one month before Nosenko was placed in isolation. It
outlined a plan for "hostile interrogation." It noted: "Subject must be
broken at some point if we are to learn something of the full scope of
the KGB plan."
CIA investigators also recovered notes said to have been written near
the end of the detention, outlining possible ways to end and cover up
the Nosenko affair. The objective: "to liquidate & insofar as possible
to clean up traces of a sitn in which CIA cd be accused of illegally
holding Nosenko." Among the options were to "liquidate the man,"
"render him incapable of giving coherent story (special dose of drug
etc.)," and "commitment to loony bin w/out making him nuts."
In his 2007 book "Spy Wars," former CIA officer Tennent Bagley
acknowledges that he wrote the notes but says he had no murderous
intent. He says in his book that he was merely "giving vent to
frustration in the way a baseball fan might shout, 'Kill the umpire!'"
Suggestions of killing Nosenko or rendering him crazy were "impossible
and impractical," he writes. He still believes Nosenko was a Soviet
plant, decades after the CIA formally embraced him as a bona fide
defector.
For his part, Nosenko has said that while he was angry about his
treatment, he never blamed the CIA. Instead, it was a small group of
CIA officers whom he calls "the ugly ones."
In his 1998 speech, Nosenko urged young intelligence officers to "never
allow a repeat of such cases." Defectors should be allowed to remain
free but kept under tight surveillance, he said. Locking people up
under "ugly conditions" achieves nothing, he said.
Nosenko ended that speech by telling his audience that he came to the
US in 1964 but that his life in America began in 1969. "I love this
country," he said. "I am a very proud American."
To the chagrin of Mr. Bagley, Nosenko's former handler, they gave him a
standing ovation.
*
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