Anatoly Mikhailovich Golitsyn

Anatoliy Golitsyn (also Golytsin and Golitsyn, Russian Анатолий Михайлович Голицын * 25. August 1926 in Pyriatyn in the Ukrainian SSR ; † 29. December 2008 in the southern states of the US) was a Soviet intelligence officer, most recently with the rank of Major of the KGB , and defectors.

career path

In 1946 Golitsyn joined the MGB , the predecessor institution of the KGB . From 1950 to 1953 he worked in the America Department of Counterintelligence . From mid-1953 he was employed as a resident in the Soviet embassy in Vienna . In the course of the preparations for the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955 and the previous partial withdrawal of Soviet troops from occupied Austria , he was ordered back to Moscow at the end of 1954 .

After his promotion to major in 1958, he became an employee of the PGU department of the KGB, which was responsible in particular for the intelligence surveillance of NATO . In 1960 he was disguised as an embassy attaché Klimow in Helsinki .

Overflow 1961

On returning from home leave, he fled with his wife and child on December 22, 1961 to the residence of the US intelligence service CIA in Helsinki. As a sign of his willingness to convert, he first betrayed some Soviet agents in Finland . After initially contradicting statements, he led the CIA on the trail of the “ top agent ” of the KGB in the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), Heinz Felfe , without giving any direct name .

He was then taken to the United States for further interrogations , where he was referred to the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 in London on the basis of his detailed statements by the head of the CIA counter-espionage department, James Jesus Angleton , to whom he gave decisive advice on the uncovering of double agent Kim Philby .

Here he betrayed the Soviet agent Anthony Blunt . After his identity became public due to a newspaper report in the Daily Telegraph , he traveled back to the USA because of feared assassinations by the KGB. There he and his family were given a new identity, under which they have lived ever since.

Information and consequences

Due to his complex personality and his increased propensity for self-expression, Golitsyn provided Angleton with a range of information, which was composed of knowledge, half-knowledge and ignorance. The fact that much of his information was pure invention can be explained by the fact that he wanted to ensure that he and his family were granted protection by the American secret service and US citizenship.

For example, he revealed an alleged Soviet master plan that the KGB would use a multitude of alleged Soviet defectors to direct targeted disinformation to Western intelligence services. These, according to Golitsyn, only sold disinformation to the “West” so that the Soviet Union could gain world domination . These include such absurd claims, such as B. that the Swedish top politician and later Prime Minister Olof Palme , but also the employee in the Department of State and later Foreign Minister Henry Kissinger were led by the KGB and strongly influenced. He also gave an unnamed reference to a KGB mole in the CIA. This internal agent was given the code name "Sascha"; the search for him paralyzed American intelligence for years. Golitsyn's testimony marked the beginning of a "witch hunt" known as Operation Honetol, which lasted about 13 years and as a result of which around a hundred of the best Soviet specialists in the CIA were suspected of espionage and many were dismissed from service. Almost every KGB defector was sent home again in the following years because, thanks to Golitsyn, he was thought to be a disinformant. The search for the phantom "Sascha" paralyzed almost all work against the Soviet Union and it was the Agency's "greatest trauma", complained the later CIA boss William Egan Colby . In particular, Angleton's instructions to its foreign agents in this regard to cease all processing of defectors from the Soviet Union was one of the reasons why the CIA and thus the USA ultimately received important advance information about the Soviet troops marching into Prague in 1968 and the crushing of the Prague Spring were missing.

literature

• Anatolij Golizin: New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation . Dodd, Mead, New York 1984, ISBN 0-396-08194-0 .
• Phillip Knightley: The History of Espionage in the 20th Century. Structure and organization, successes and failures of the great secret services. Scherz, Bern et al. 1989, ISBN 3-502-16384-7 .
• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry at persons-info.com , accessed on April 24, 2018