FOIAWEAR — THE MONSTER PLOT / The Nosenko Case Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 061

THE MONSTER PLOT — on 5 June 1962 a Soviet official named Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko walked into the American mission in Geneva to sell two secrets for 2,000 Swiss francs. He said he was a KGB officer, and that he had handled the file of a man called Lee Harvey Oswald. The case officers cabled headquarters: “SUBJ CONCLUSIVELY PROVED BONA FIDES.” He defected in February 1964.

It went wrong because of a defector who had arrived before him. Anatoliy Golitsyn had come over in Helsinki in December 1961 with a theory: that almost everything the West believed about the Soviet Union was manufactured, that the split with China was a fake, and that the KGB ran a mammoth programme of dezinformatsiya designed to make Western services believe what Moscow wanted them to believe. In a 142-page internal study written years later, the Agency described it in the only words that fit. It called the thesis the Monster Plot — “and no other name serves so aptly to capsulize what the theorizers envisaged as a major threat to United States security.”

Because Nosenko told the same stories as Golitsyn, counterintelligence read the agreement as proof that both were part of the same operation. A memorandum set the aim plainly: “Our goal in this case must be eventually to break Subject.” Rather than debrief him normally, the Agency built a cell and put him in it. He spent more than three years there — a chapter of the study is titled, without irony, “Life in a Vault.” Officers who disagreed were warned they might be suspected of working for the KGB. A senior psychologist who interviewed Nosenko and concluded that, at the very least, Nosenko was in fact Nosenko was told there were things in the case he did not know about. The file is punctuated by pages removed entirely: “PAGES 30 THROUGH 64 WITHHELD IN THEIR ENTIRETY.”

Nosenko turned out to be exactly who he said he was. His information led to the discovery, in 1964, of 52 microphones hidden in the US embassy in Moscow, 42 of them still live. The Office of Security took over his handling in October 1967 and moved him to a normal house within weeks. The 1976 re-investigation concluded: “We therefore conclude that Nosenko was from the beginning a bona fide defector.” Its chapter on the cost to the Agency's own work is titled “How CIA Worked to Defeat Itself.”

The artwork shows the Monster Plot as the document itself describes it — a beast assembled out of redaction, with a microphone where its eye should be, over a desk lit by one lamp and a figure seen from behind. No faces are depicted anywhere in this design.

The QR code on the front opens the source: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/00096372 — the declassified study itself, released in full on 25 August 2022. Every quotation above is from its pages.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717, 6.1 oz garment-dyed cotton, S–4XL. Front print only; plain back. Artwork approximately 8 × 5.3 in, QR approximately 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Colours: offered in both dark and light garment colours — the beast in oxblood and bone on Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy and Pepper, and the same scene struck as a dark ink plate on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green and Chambray.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, tumble dry low. Do not iron the print directly.

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