6 Soviet intelligence officers and officers who escaped from the USSR

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Soviet citizens who decided to stay in the West were usually called defectors and defectors. Among them were many scientists and representatives of the creative intelligentsia. But the most painful for the Soviet Union were the escapes of representatives of power structures, intelligence officers and diplomats. Each of them had their own reasons for fleeing, and life abroad sometimes turned out quite differently from what they dreamed of.

Georgy Agabekov (Gevork Arutyunov)

He became the first high-ranking Soviet intelligence official who decided to escape from the "socialist paradise" in the 1930s. Georgy Agabekov served in the GPU in Afghanistan and Iran, worked in the central intelligence apparatus, was an illegal in Constantinople, from where he fled to France in 1930. There are two versions of the reasons for the escape of Agabekov to this day. He himself said that he was not satisfied with the Kremlin's policy and the methods of work of the special services, but there were persistent rumors that the intelligence officer fled because of an affair with a foreign citizen who taught English in Constantinople.

After his escape, Gevork Arutyunov wrote a book about the OGPU, after the publication of which many Soviet agents were arrested in the Middle East, and relations between Iran and the Soviet Union deteriorated sharply. The reckoning overtook the former intelligence officer in 1937. A special group of the NKVD found and eliminated Georgy Agabekov in France.

Anatoly Golitsyn

He served in the KGB in the strategic planning department, and after his appointment as a Soviet attaché in Helsinki under an assumed name, he decided to go over to the side of the CIA. After his escape in December 1961, he passed on a lot of important information, including about Soviet agents.

Golitsyn in the West has been called both the most valuable defector and unreliable conspiracy theorist. Despite the fact that after his escape Kim Philby, Donald McLain and others were exposed, the main goal was never achieved, and the Soviet agent in the CIA was not revealed. Golitsyn accused the British Prime Minister of collaborating with the KGB, but numerous checks have not been confirmed. In general, Golitsyn caused irreparable harm to Soviet intelligence, but at the same time his information sowed panic in the intelligence services of several countries. There are still people who consider Anatoly Golitsyn a double agent who worked for the CIA and the KGB.

Alexander Zuev

The captain of the USSR Air Force, who served in the 176 Fighter Aviation Regiment, treated his colleagues to a cake in May 1989, allegedly on the occasion of the birth of his son. A large dose of sleeping pills was mixed into the cake. After the servicemen fell asleep, he wounded the awake mechanic and hijacked a MiG-29 fighter. Sitting at the airfield in Trabzon, Zuev declared himself an American, thereby securing the arrival of representatives of the US Embassy in Turkey.

As a result of lengthy proceedings, the Turkish court acquitted Zuev, the plane was returned to the Soviet Union, and the hijacker himself received political asylum in the United States. Later in his book, he will write about the reasons that prompted him to escape: problems in the service and in his personal life, disillusionment with the Soviet system and the dispersal of an opposition rally near the Government House of the Georgian SSR in Tbilisi. Rather than simply retire from military service, he decided to flee overseas, hijacking the latest fighter jet at the time.

In the United States, the pilot was an Air Force consultant, wrote a book about his escape and died in 2001 in a plane crash, ironically crashing near Seattle on a Yak-52 trainer.

Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov

Soviet intelligence officers were in Australia for three years. Vladimir Petrov (real name Afanasy Shorokhov) went from a simple cipher in the navy to a resident of Soviet intelligence. In Australia, as before in Sweden, he was with his wife Evdokia Petrova. At the USSR Embassy in Australia, he held the post of third secretary, his wife was a cipher officer of the diplomatic mission.

Vladimir Petrov was prompted to flee by the purge in the ranks of foreign intelligence officers that began after the execution of Beria. Afanasy Shorokhov was afraid of being recalled and repressed, and therefore asked for political asylum in Australia on April 3, 1954, which he received 10 days later. A little later, his wife was also granted political asylum. After that, they tried to take Evdokia Petrova to the USSR by force. During the refueling of the plane in which the scout was at the Darwin airport, the Australian police released Evdokia Petrova, and she was able to reunite with her husband.

Subsequently, Petrov handed over to the Australians a lot of important information and documents, seized by the intelligence officer during his escape. Vladimir and Evdokia Petrovs have lived their entire lives in Australia, having received the citizenship of this country, and published the book "Empire of Fear". It is known that there was a plan to kidnap Petrov and secretly transport him to the USSR, but it was not implemented. Both spouses died in Australia, Vladimir Petrov in 1991, his wife in 2002.

Nikolay Xoxlov

He served in the NKVD fighter battalion during the Great Patriotic War and was a member of an underground sabotage group. She had to conduct her subversive activities in the capital, in case the Germans entered Moscow. Nikolai Khokhlov after the war for four years was on an intelligence mission in Romania, after returning from which he studied at the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Journalism.

In 1954, he headed a group that was supposed to liquidate one of the leaders of the Russian emigration, Georgy Okolovich, in the FRG. Khokhlov not only did not fulfill the order, but warned Okolovich, after which he was detained by American intelligence and agreed to cooperate in exchange for security guarantees for his family, which remained in the USSR. The Americans did not fulfill their promise at that time and the spy's wife Ioannina spent five years in exile.

Three years after his escape, an attempt was made on Xoxlov, but he survived after being poisoned by a radioactive isotope. In the United States, he received a degree in psychology, he taught psychology at the university. He was able to see his family only in 1992, having received a pardon thanks to the decree of Boris Yeltsin. He died of cardiac arrest in 2007.

The Soviet citizen actually did not have the opportunity to legally leave his homeland. One of the options was to marry a foreigner. And the family path was ordered for a man, since emigration was limited as much as possible. Those wishing to leave the USSR had to resort to extreme measures and think over whole schemes of illegal ways to part with their homeland. History has recorded the most desperate fugitives who hijacked planes for the sake of abroad, poisoned themselves with a large dose of medicines and threw themselves from liners into the open ocean.