Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo

town to spend the night, and then slip quietly into the courthouse in the morning to do my business with the judge. After that, I was told, I should pay a brief courtesy call on Nosenko, and then fly back home. My other order was even more simple: not, under any circumstances, to engage in any conversation with Nosenko about his years of confinement. I assumed, though no one told me this at the time, the CIA was extremely concerned that Nosenko could still sue for millions, and win. A lawsuit like that was the last thing the Agency wanted splashed all over the newspapers, less than two years removed from the Church hearings.
    So there I was, in this big Buick gas-eater, where I absolutely wasn’t supposed to be, with this voluble bear of a man behind the wheel insisting that the motel could wait, that I would be his guest for a homemade dinner at his house. The way he barked it out, it was the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse.
    Nosenko’s home, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers, was actually a relatively modest bungalow tucked at the end of a dirt road. It was on a lake, and when we first arrived, Nosenko proudly took me down to his dock, where he showed off his little fishing boat. He lived with his relatively new American wife; like a number of defectors over the years, he had left behind not only his old life but his old family when he defected. His wife was a charming, homespun type who looked to be about Nosenko’s age—around sixty-five—and seemed to dote on him. She greeted mewarmly and sat and chatted for a while. I was vastly relieved at her presence because I had just about run out of noncontroversial material to chat about with her husband. By then, however, Nosenko had retrieved from his basement a sample of what clearly was his most cherished possession—a bottle of his own personally distilled vodka (or “wotka,” as he growled with that gap-toothed grin).
    More than three decades later, I can still taste the stuff. In those days, I enjoyed an occasional vodka martini, but this was like nothing I ever consumed before or since. After one shot, my hands were tingling; after two, my feet went numb; after the third, I couldn’t feel my face. Meanwhile, Nosenko kept belting them down and started talking even more animatedly.
    Around my fourth shot, I didn’t even notice anymore that he had an accent. And then, out of nowhere, he started talking about his years of confinement. Through my deepening alcoholic fog, I didn’t know what to say or do—this was the one subject my bosses had forbidden me to get into with him. His wife, looking at him fondly, glanced over to me and quietly said, “He never has the opportunity to talk to anybody these days about this.” So I listened, and no amount of Nosenko’s homemade “wotka” could have made me forget what he told me.
    Basically, Nosenko said he bore no grudges against anybody. Not James Angleton, not the other Soviet defector who had convinced Angleton that he was a Soviet plant, not his interrogators with all of their brutal deprivations, not the Agency leadership, which stood by and let him rot in that box for three years. “They had do it,” he shrugged. “That is the nature of our business and that’s what you do to a man like me. . . . I knew I was telling the truth, and I knew that if I didn’t break that someday they would believe me. . . . I knew what they wanted, they wanted me to say that I was sent here to lie about Oswald and what KGB knew about him, but I wouldn’t do that because if I did, your government would have sent me back to Russia, and KGB would do things far worse to me than what CIA was doing to me. . . . Your colleagues didn’t torture me. They don’t know what real torture is.”
    On and on he went, pouring shot after shot. I struggled to recall it all, since even in my increasingly inebriated state I knew I needed to remember all this. “So why,” I finally slurred, “are you telling me all this, some young