His father, Nosenko Ivan Isidorovich, Stalin's favorite, selflessly loyal to the leader, the minister of shipbuilding, died of a heart attack in 1954 when he learned of Khrushchev's decision to cut allocations for the country's Navy, in particular, to abandon the construction of two aircraft carriers.
Yuri Nosenko, as befits the offspring of a nomenclature parent, did not experience any difficulties. In 1942 he entered the Nakhimov School, and in 1944 - at the Naval Academy. However, after he accidentally shot himself in the left arm, he was discharged and fired to civilian life. Immediately he entered the most prestigious university in the country - MGIMO, and after graduation he began serving in the GRU. In 1953, he was transferred to the MGB, namely to the 1st department of the Second Main Directorate, which carried out counterintelligence counter-intelligence operations of the US special services.
A successful career was helped by the patronage of D. F. Ustinov, first deputy Khrushchev and chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. Yuri quickly moved up the career ladder, especially since in the 1950s - early 1960s, only 30% of the employees of the second head office had a higher education, and only a few knew foreign languages, he also knew and therefore traveled abroad more often than others. In 1957-1962, he went on short-term business trips to England, Cuba, Switzerland, which at that time was an unthinkable success and even a luxury for Soviet intelligence officers.
Needless to say, the attitude of colleagues towards Nosenko was negative, but not at all out of envy. Colonel L. Efremov, expressing the opinion of the team of one of the divisions of the second head of the KGB, in 1961 spoke of him as follows: “Yuri Nosenko is a man spoiled by living conditions, behaving arrogantly and rudely with his colleagues, ignoring the head of the department, and also inclined to use alcoholic beverages. Nosenko tends to lead friendship with people in high positions. He recruited foreigners on incriminating materials, because he was not sufficiently prepared to carry it out on an ideological basis."
… While in Geneva as part of the Soviet disarmament delegation as a "brick", KGB captain Yuri Nosenko asked the American diplomat for a confidential conversation. The diplomat notified the CIA resident in Bern about this, and the petitioner was received by George Kaisvalter, the famous CIA "scalp hunter" who recruited potential traitors from among the Soviet secret services. By that time, he had already recruited military intelligence officers Colonels Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky, as well as the future GRU Major General Dmitry Polyakov.
"Brick", in order to return the state money spent in a brothel, expressed his readiness to transfer some secret information to the CIA for 900 Swiss francs. He also asked to get him medicine for his daughter, who was recovering in the hospital for bronchial asthma. Kaisvalter agreed to all the conditions, and then the "initiator" suffered …
Spy dust
Promotional video:
Nosenko conveyed to Kaisvalter information about the recruiting approaches of the KGB, both taken place and planned, to several Anglo-Saxon diplomats with non-traditional sexual orientation.
Among the individuals named were Joseph Alsop, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, a close friend of US President John F. Kennedy, Canadian Ambassador to the USSR John Watkins, and British Admiralty (Navy) intelligence officer John Vassal.
The Initiative also provided Kaisvalter with detailed information about listening devices in the building of the American Embassy on the Garden Ring. There were 42 of them in total, and they were in bamboo tubes behind heating radiators.
The German diplomatic mission was tapped in the same way, where the ambassador, intending to publish his memoirs, every evening dictated to the secretary a report on the events of the day, including correspondence with Bonn, NATO and the ambassadors of other countries, unaware that he was broadcasting directly into the microphones of the KGB recording studio.
Igor Atamanov