outstanding defeat was the launching of the SDI, and that was administered to them by
LaRouche.
In a grim postlude to the Team B exercise, Bush's hand-picked staff director for the
operation, John Paisley, the Soviet analyst (Paisley was the former deputy director of the
CIA's Office of Strategic Research) and CIA liaison to the Plumbers, disappeared on
September 24, 1978 while sailing on Chesapeake Bay in his sloop, the Brillig. Several
days later a body was found floating in the bay in an advanced state of decomposition,
and with a gun shot wound behind the left ear. The corpse was weighed down by two sets
of ponderous diving belts. The body was four inches shorter than Paisley's own height,
and Paisley's wife later asserted that the body found was not that of her husband. Despite
all this, the body was positively identified as Paisley's, the death summarily ruled a
suicide, and the body quickly cremated at a funeral home approved by the Office of
Security. Paisley had been involved along with Angleton in the debriefing and managing
of Soviet defectors like Nosenko and Nikolai Artamonov/"Shadrin," and various aspects
of this case show that the Bush-Cherne Team B had not really ceased its operations after
1976-77, but had continued to function. Some have attempted to identify Paisley as Deep
Throat. Others have suggested that he was a KGB mole. Either story, if true, might lead
to highly embarrassing consequences for George Bush. [fn 55]
The Shadrin case just mentioned allows us to follow Bush a few steps further into the
world of Soviet defectors, exchanges, kidnappings, murders, and other grisly rites of the
cold war. Nicolai Artamonov alias Nick Shadrin was a Soviet naval officer who had
defected to the west in the 1950's, and who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
There are indications that Shadrin was encouraged by his US handlers to let himself be
contacted by the Soviets so that he could become a double agent. In December, 1975
Shadrin was sent to Vienna by the CIA, where he disappeared. According to some
versions, he had been a Soviet agent all along, and went back to Moscow under the orders
of the KGB. According to other versions, Shadrin was cynically delivered up by his CIA
handlers to certain death at the hands of the KGB within the framework of a dirty
operation to enhance the career of another KGB agent who had secretly gone to work for
the CIA while remaining with the KGB. [fn 56]
The handling of defectors such as Shadrin represented that part of CIA operations where
James Jesus Angleton spun his web, so were are moving through an obfuscated
wilderness of mirrors in broaching this subject. But it seems well established that Bush
acquired a personal role in the Shadrin affair through his deception of Shadrin's wife, Eva
Shadrin, who was desperately seeking to find out what had happened to her husband.
With the help of friends, Eva Shadrin appealed for assistance to Senators John Sparkman,
and James Eastland, to Speaker of the House Carl Albert, to Pentagon officials and to
PFIAB. On February 5, Mrs. Shadrin received a call from Brent Scowcroft saying that
the case had been brought to his attention. The same day Gen. Vernon Walters called to
say that Scowcroft was meeting with him at that very hour to see what could be done.
Bush then appointed CIA Counterintelligence Chief George Kalaris to oversee
cooperation with Mrs. Sadrin and her lawyer, Richard Copaken. Kalaris is accused in one
published account of this story of having helped to delivered Shadrin into the hands of