Yuri Nosenko, a Soviet KGB agent whose defection to the United States in 1964 and subsequent three-year harsh detention and hostile interrogation by CIA officials remains immensely controversial, died Aug. 23 under an assumed name in a Southern state, according to intelligence officials. He was 81.
Nosenko, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, personally interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald during his time in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962. When Nosenko defected in 1964, he provided the first information that Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was not a Soviet agent.
Senior CIA officers at the time did not believe Nosenko was a real defector and ordered his imprisonment.
Nosenko initially had made inaccurate statements about his past, and some of his information conflicted with another KGB officer who had defected the year before. As a result, they considered him a plant sent by Moscow to confuse Washington about Oswald.
Richard Helms, then CIA director of operations, in 1966 ordered that a conclusion be reached in the Nosenko case. In 1967, after passing multiple polygraphs, Nosenko was released, and in 1969 he was found to be a legitimate defector. He subsequently became a consultant to the agency, was given a new identity and was provided a home in an undisclosed location in the South.
Abie Nathan, the peace activist who made a dramatic solo flight to Egypt in a rattletrap single-engine plane and later founded the groundbreaking "Voice of Peace" radio station, died Wednesday in Tel Aviv. He was 81. Nathan burst onto the world of Middle East diplomacy in 1966 with his solo flight more than a decade before Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. Although he failed in his initial bid to talk peace with the Egyptians, his daredevil escapade won the affection of many Israelis and launched a long and often eccentric one-man crusade to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Del Martin, a pioneering lesbian rights activist who married her longtime partner in June on the first day that California's same-sex couples gained that right, died Wednesday in San Francisco. She was 87. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Del and partner Phyllis Lyon were instrumental in getting gay marriage legalized. "We would not have marriage equality in California if it weren't for Del and Phyllis. They fought and triumphed in many battles," Pelosi said.
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