Shvets,
Yuri B. Tr., Eugene Ostrovsky. Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy
in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Shvets,
Yuri B. Tr., Eugene Ostrovsky. Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy
in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Clark comment: Shvets, a KGB First Directorate officer, worked under TASS cover in Washington, DC, from 1985 to 1987. He describes his main function as trying "to recruit U.S. citizens to acquire secret information about U.S. domestic and foreign policy."
Chambers notes that Shvets' "task was made more difficult by very aggressive FBI counterintelligence.... He was able to develop one very useful political source (called Socrates) who was a well-connected member of the Carter administration.... This book is a useful addition to intelligence literature primarily because of the insights it gives into the internal politics of the KGB and the support it gives to the model of the organization as one that is strongly polarized between bureaucrats and working agents." Click for Chambers' full review.
According to Warren, Surveillant 4.3, Shvets does not name his recruit, Socrates or his wife, but "Herbert Romerstein has analyzed the background data and concluded ... that they are 'journalist Claudia Wright and her husband, former Carter Administration official John Helmer.'" [Helmer denied this in a 5 March 1995 "60 Minutes" broadcast.] This is "a short book which reads fast and which may or may not be part of a Russian disinformation effort."
See also, Dmitry Radyshevsky and Nataliya Gevorkyan, "The Memoirs of a Soviet Intelligence Officer Have Created a Big Panic," Moscow News, 22-28 Apr. 1994, 14 (cited in CWIHP 6-7, p. 289).
Tumanov,
Oleg. Tr., David Floyd. Tumanov: Confessions of a KGB Agent. Chicago,
IL: Edition Q, 1994.
Surveillant 3.4/5 notes that from 1966 to 1986, Tumanov worked for Radio Liberty, posing as a Russian dissident. Valcourt, IJI&C 7.4, comments that Kalugin's The First Directorate casts Tumanov as "a defector who offered his services to the KGB as part of a deal to return to the USSR years after deserting the [Soviet] navy." Kalugin also says it was he who directed Tumarov to plant a bomb at Radio Liberty's Munich headquarters in 1981. Tumarov campaigned against Kalugin's candidacy for the Congress of People's Deputies in 1990.
Werner, Ruth. Sonjas Rapport. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1977. Sonya's Report: The Fascinating Autobiography of One of Russia's Most Remarkable Secret Agents. London: Chatto & Windrus, 1991.
Surveillant 2.1 identifies Sonya's Report as the autobiography of a "Soviet agent and associate/lover of Richard Sorge." It is the "professional memoir of a Communist intelligence agent.... Her greatest coup: the passing of British A-bomb secrets from Klaus Fuchs to Stalin."
Ruth Werner (born Ursula Ruth Kuczynski in Berlin in 1907) died in Berlin on 7 July 2000 at the age of 93. Her obituary, "Ruth Werner," Times (London), 10 Jul. 2000, 27, termed her "[o]ne of the most effective agents for the Soviet Union in the early, tension-filled years of the Cold War." Werner's skills as a Soviet agent are illustrated by the continuation of her work dispatching Klaus Fuchs' take to Moscow for two years after her cover had been blown to British security. After fleeing the United Kingdom in 1949, she became "a key member" of the bureaucracy of the East German Communist Party, "in which she served for several decades."
See David Binder, "Ruth Werner, Colorful and Daring Soviet Spy, Dies at 93," New York Times, 23 Jul. 2000, 27; "Cold War Spy Ruth Werner," Washington Post, 9 Jul. 2000, C6; "Ruth Werner, Soviet Spy, Died on July 7th, Aged 93," The Economist, 13 Jul. 2000, 26; and Michael Hartland, "Sonia, The Spy Who Haunted Britain," Sunday Times, 15 Jul. 2000, 1, 3.
For more on Werner's life in the world of Communist espionage, read Benjamin B. Fischer, "Farewell to Sonia, the Spy Who Haunted Britain," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 15, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 61-76. Fischer notes that, strictly speaking, Werner "was not ... a spy. As a GRU ... agent and illegal who served as liaison between the Moscow Center and the real spies, she was rather a spy-handler." As SONIA of the Venona transcripts, she handled both Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood, work that "put[s] her in the superstar category" in espionage history.
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