On September 23, 1978, John Arthur Paisley was reported missing after he disappeared from his boat, Brillig, which was equipped with sophisticated communications equipment, in the Chesapeake Bay.
Days later, Paisley’s body was identified in the bay, fitted with weighted diver’s belts around the waist. He had been shot in the head with a 9mm bullet. Senate investigators called Paisley’s case “one of the spookiest ever.”[1]
Paisley’s estranged wife Maryann said that she did not believe that the body was that of her husband, as it was four inches shorter and some 30 pounds lighter than his. [2]
Maryann sued the CIA for documents related to her husband’s case.
The Maryland State Police initially suggested that Paisley’s death was by suicide, and the CIA, in response to questions posed by reporters, saw “no reason to disagree.”
The Maryland police later concluded that death was “undetermined,” however, only after a belated investigation was marred by what they called the “contamination” of evidence by CIA security officers, who were the first to search the boat.[3]
Maryann told Covert Action Information Bulletin in 1979 that the CIA had persuaded her, right after her husband’s body was found, to have it cremated and that various death records of the Maryland authorities had been altered to coverup evidence.[4]
Unusually, before the cremation, Paisley’s hands were first severed and sent to the FBI. There was never any fingerprint identification and no blood was found on the Brillig.
Paisley’s body had been cremated but, unusually, the hands were first severed and sent to the FBI.
The bullet that killed him was fired behind his left ear, which is odd for a suicide. Paisley was right-handed and, based on all the forensic evidence that came to light, would have had to have shot himself while jumping from the boat, loaded with a weight, in a twisted position that made this scenario impossible.
In newspaper interviews, Paisley’s psychiatrist and a woman friend whom he saw often before his disappearance said that he had given no “clues” of contemplating suicide.[5]
Born in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, Paisley had enjoyed a 25-year career in the Agency. A master radio operator, he entered the CIA leadership’s inner circle due to his expertise in the use of spy satellites, eavesdropping satellites and listening posts.
Also an expert in Soviet nuclear capability, Paisley was given the assignment of debriefing KGB defectors, including Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, the most senior KGB defector in the 1960s, and became a close confidant of George H. W. Bush, whose private telephone numbers were found in his phone books.
Holding an electrical engineering degree from the University of Chicago, Paisley worked closely with CIA counterintelligence director James J. Angleton, who had recruited Paisley when the latter was working as a radio operator in Palestine before the founding of the State of Israel.[6]
After his death, the CIA underplayed Paisley’s stature within the Agency and role as an undercover operative. Among other things, Paisley had participated in a secret project to discredit leakers of the Pentagon Papers.
He was a liaison to Nixon’s “Plumbers,” and had broken into foreign embassies on their behalf, and participated in sex parties in Washington where high-level Nixon appointees tied up women and beat them.[7]
During Gerald Ford’s presidency, Paisley served as a deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research. In that capacity, he played an important behind-the-scenes role in the Team B report of 1976, which promoted alarmist views about the Soviet Union and was critical of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente.[8]
Team B’s members included hard-line neo-conservatives such as Richard E. Pipes, Clare Boothe Luce, Edward Teller, Paul Wolfowitz (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency), General John W. Vogt, and Paul Nitze (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs), one of the fathers of the Cold War.[9]
Holding access to highly classified intelligence information, Paisley had been under pressure to inflate the Soviet threat to justify high military budgets and could have been seen as a barrier to the neo-conservatives’ efforts to reinvigorate the Cold War.
Another theory was that Paisley had become a Soviet spy and that the Chesapeake Bay incident had been contrived to disguise Paisley’s defection. Others have hypothesized that Paisley was killed by the CIA’s Old Guard, who resented his warm relations with Nosenko, a suspected double agent.[10]
“Deep state” researcher Mae Brussell believed that Paisley was connected with CIA drug-money laundering operations through the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia and that his murder had to do with that—as did the 1996 murder of former CIA Director William Colby, who was legal counsel of the Nugan Hand bank.
Howard Blum’s book, The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal, spotlights the decades-long investigation of Pete Bagley, one-time head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division and ally of James J. Angleton, into Paisley’s death.
Forced to retire from the Agency for pursuing this line of inquiry, Bagley uncovered that Nosenko was indeed a double agent and that Paisley was Angleton’s mole and that his treachery resulted in the KGB’s execution of numerous defectors to the CIA whom Paisley gave up.
In Blum’s telling, Paisley faked his death on September 23, 1978 and escaped to the Soviet Union to live out his days, At the end of his life, Bagley met with KGB Lieutenant General Sergey Kondrashev, head of Soviet counterintelligence, who identified Nosenko as a Soviet double agent and fake defector and took Bagley to a cemetery in Moscow where he suggested that Paisley was buried.[11]
The full truth of the mystery may never fully be known, though one key takeaway is that the spycraft profession is not one for the faint-hearted and that the Great Game that played out during the Cold War was often a deadly one—on all sides.
John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3; Tad Szulc, “The Missing CIA Man,” The New York Times, January 7, 1979; Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 3; “Conspiracy Theories: John Paisley,” https://www.spyculture.com/clandestime-145-conspiracy-theories-john-paisley/. ↑
“Was it Really Paisley?” Covert Action Information Bulletin, January 1979, 24. ↑
Szulc, “The Missing CIA Man”; “Conspiracy Theories: John Paisley.” Later, a police investigation concluded that Paisley was killed in an “execution-style murder.” ↑
“Was it Really Paisley?” 24. ↑
Szulc, “The Missing CIA Man”; Howard Blum, The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal (New York: Harper, 2022). ↑
Szulc, “The Missing CIA Man”; Blum, The Spy Who Knew Too Much. ↑
Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005), 96, 97; William R. Corson, Joseph J. Trento, and Susan B. Trento, Widows: Four American spies, the wives they left behind, and the KGB’s crippling of American intelligence (London: Macdonald, 1989); https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKpaisley.htm. ↑
Prados, Lost Crusader, 3; Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), 251; Blum, The Spy Who Knew Too Much. ↑
See Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1999). ↑
On the latter, see William Safire, “Slithy Toves of CIA,” The New York Times, January 22, 1979, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1979/01/22/issue.html Nosenko also may have provided information on Lee Harvey Oswald that indicated he was a CIA agent and likely patsy in the Kennedy assassination, which Paisley may have been privy to. Nosenko had pointed to Oswald cutting any ties to the KGB, which undercut the narrative that the KGB was behind Kennedy’s assassination—a view advanced by Angleton and in Edward Jay Epstein’s 1978 book Legend. ↑
Blum, The Spy Who Knew Too Much. Some investigators question Bagley and Blum’s conclusion by noting that Paisley’s briefcase and key documents were left on the Brillig. If he had escaped to the Soviet Union, he would have likely brought these. An alternative explanation, however, is that he left behind his briefcase to mislead police and investigators and cause them to believe he had not defected to the Soviet Union when he had. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
“Paul Nitze (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs), one of the fathers of the Cold War.”
Yes, but who later advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/11/take-a-lesson-from-paul-nitze-abolish-nuclear-weapons/