several officers and tied up operations against the Soviet target.
Golitsyn’s accusations that Yuri Nosenkowas a false defector and a
dispatched KGB double agentconvinced the CIA to illegally incar-
cerate him for three years.
Golitsyn’s charges of KGB penetration were eventually proven
false, but by that time he had badly damaged U.S. intelligence oper-
ations. While some analysts went so far as to declare Golitsyn a KGB
plant, studies of the case suggest that the damage to the CIA was self-
inflicted, that senior counterintelligence officials accepted Golitsyn’s
charges out of fear that the KGB could penetrate their agencies the
way it had British, French, and German intelligence.GOLOS, JOSEPH [RAISEN, JACOB] (1890–1943). After immi-
grating to the United States as a political refugee from tsarist repres-
sion, Golos joined the American communist movement. During the
Russian civil war, he returned to his homeland to serve the infant So-
viet state and was recruited into foreign intelligence. In 1927 he re-
turned to the United States, where he worked as an illegal. His cover
was the head of World Tourists, which arranged travel for Americans
interested in visiting the Soviet Union. The cover allowed Golos to
move money and people into and out of the United States.
Golos was one of the key people in the Soviet intelligence network.
His code name was “Zvuk” (Sound). He acted as a recruiter and agent
handler as well as the link between agents recruited by the Commu-
nist Party and the NKVD. His most important sources were the agents
of the Silvermaster group, more than 20 American civil servants
who volunteered to work for Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. Golos
also managed an operation that forged passports for Soviet agents.
One of Golos’s couriers was his lover, Elizabeth Bentley, who
maintained contact with important sources in the U.S. Treasury De-
partment, the White House, and the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS). Julius Rosenberg contacted Golos in the early 1940s and
was referred by him to a Soviet case officer. The strain of managing
cover companies, forging documents, and running agents took a ter-
rible toll on his life and Golos died of a heart attack in late 1943. His
death seriously unsettled Soviet intelligence operations in the United
States. The NKVD rezidenturabadly handled some of his agents,
and their ham-handedness convinced Bentley to defect.98 •GOLOS, JOSEPH [RAISEN, JACOB] (1890–1943)06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 98