Yuri Nosenko

Yuri Nosenko, along with Anatoliy Golitsyn, remains one of the Cold War's controversies. A KGB officer, he made contact with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1962, and came over to the American side. James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterespionage, concluded he was a Soviet plant, meant to discredit Golitsyn, an earlier defector. Angleton had him subjected, for several years, to extrajudicial detention in solitary confinement, and under harsh conditions. While the consensus of the United States intelligence community is that he was genuine, as he insisted until his death in 2008, there are still CIA officers, such as Worth Bagley, who insist he was not genuine.