Guyon Espiner

In an environment where deception was routine, relationships were always hard to gauge.

My friend, the defector, was a man named Yuri Nosenko.

He's a really interesting guy.

He was a chap who defected just after the assassination of Kennedy.

And he was the guy that came and told the agency that Lee Harvey Oswald was not, you know, was not, because the Soviets were terrified.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated US President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963.

From 1959 to May of 1962, he was living in Russia.

His wife was Russian and his son had been born there.

Yuri said he walked in and the KGB were frightened of him.

They thought he was barking, so they didn't want to touch him.

And I don't think they did.

They didn't recruit him.

But they were very keen to make sure the Americans knew that they hadn't recruited him.

So Yuri Nosenko reinforces that idea that the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination of Kennedy.

Although, when you think about it in the context of Cold War mistrust, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Yuri told some of these stories that no one was quite sure what was true.

And so it was suggested that Yuri was a dangle, that he wasn't a genuine defector.

And he was treated very, very badly.

This is all before my time.

Then they decided that he was, in fact, genuine.