Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov

Dmitri Fjodorowitsch Polyakow ( Russian Дмитрий Фёдорович Поляков ; born July 6, 1921 in Starobelsk , † March 15, 1988 in Moscow ) was a Soviet officer. He became major general of the military intelligence service GRU and spied from 1961, first for the FBI and later for the CIA . After his trial in the USSR , he was sentenced to death and shot in Moscow on March 15, 1988 .

Life

Polyakov was born the son of an accountant and graduated from 10-grade middle school in 1939. He closed after two years of training in June 1941 the artillery school in Sumy ( Russian Сумское высшее артиллерийское командное училище ), and served as an artillery officer (platoon commander, battery commander, from 1943 officer for reconnaissance in an artillery regiment) in World War II . For his bravery he was awarded three battle forums and several medals.

After the war, studying at the Frunze Military Academy and training courses at the GRU, he entered the Soviet military intelligence service. His first task was to accompany the Soviet delegation to the Military Staff Committee of the UN Security Council in New York from 1951 to 1956.

Secret service activities

On his second mission in New York from 1959 to 1961, he served the counterintelligence of the FBI as an informant. Further assignments took him from 1965 to 1969 to Rangoon , Burma and from 1973 to 1976 and 1979 to 1980 to New Delhi , where he worked as a Soviet military attaché and GRU resident. Within the CIA, the suspicion arose that Polyakov might be a mole because he was disgusted by the corruption of the Soviet party elite. Viktor Cherkashin also suspected that he was bitter because the Soviet leadership had refused him permission to take his seriously ill son, the eldest of his three sons, to a hospital in New York so that he could receive appropriate medical treatment could. This son died of complications from the treatable disease, and soon after Polyakov began his informant activities.

He remained a CIA informant for 25 years as he continued his career and rose to the rank of major general. CIA officers spoke in superlatives about the type of information he provided:

"Polyakov was our crown jewel, [...] the best source at least to my knowledge that American intelligence has ever had and I would submit, although I certainly can't be certain, but the best source that any intelligence service has ever had. "

"Polyakov was our crown jewel, [...] the best source, at least as far as I know, that American intelligence has ever had, and I would like to say, although I can certainly not be sure, the best source that any intelligence service has ever had."

- Sandra ("Sandy") Grimes

"Polyakov was the jewel in the crown."

"Polyakov was the jewel in the crown."

- James Woolsey

According to all the reports of his American commanding officers that became known, he was not particularly interested in money, because he acted for moral and ethical reasons, because of his boundless disappointment with the top political leadership of the Soviet Union, especially with party leader Nikita Khrushchev . Within the GRU, Polyakov acted as such a staunch supporter of the CPSU leadership, especially Leonid Breshnew , that he was even suggested to become a full-time political officer. Polyakov turned down this offer because it would have prevented him from traveling abroad in the future and further links with the CIA would have been made more difficult.

Significant information Polyakov provided included:

• Evidence of the growing gap between the Soviet Union and China . This information played a central role in President Richard Nixon's decision to establish diplomatic relations with China in 1972.
• Technical data on Soviet anti-tank missiles . With the US never engaged in direct combat operations with the Soviet Union, knowledge of these weapons was invaluable when they were used in Iraq during the Gulf War .
• Proof that Frank Bossard was a Soviet Union spy.
• Exposure of the American Lieutenant Colonel William H. Whalen , the highest American military man to date who has ever become a Soviet spy.
• Information on approx. 150 Soviet informants in the West, information on 19 "illegals" from the GRU in the West and personal data on approx. 1300 GRU intelligence officers.
• Transmission of an extensive GRU document to the CIA, in which the GRU intelligence officers were oriented in 1974 by the GRU leadership on the acquisition of approx. 5000 cutting-edge technologies in the West. From this the CIA recognized for the first time clearly the enormous technological deficit of the Soviet economy, and from the knowledge of this document all subsequent embargo measures by the USA against the Soviet Union to prevent the acquisition of high technologies result.

Arrest and execution

Polyakov was arrested by the KGB in 1986, six years after he left the GRU . Initially, his contacts at the CIA had no information about what had happened to him. Only later did it emerge that he had been betrayed by both Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames . In 1988 Polyakov was sentenced to death and executed . The specific reasons for his exposure, after the counterintelligence of the KGB had searched in vain for the "mole" in their own ranks for many years, was named by the intelligence historian Jürgen W. Schmidt in a lengthy biographical article on Polyakov in 2017. Despite glasnost , Pravda did not report the execution of the death sentence until 1990.

literature

• Jürgen W. Schmidt: Life and death of the GRU Major General Dmitri Polyakov (1921–1988). In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (ed.): Spies, double agents and Islamist threats (= secret service history; 5). Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus, Ludwigsfelde 2017, ISBN 978-3-933022-93-6 , pp. 197–244.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Elaine Shannon: Death of The Perfect Spy. In: Time . June 24, 2001, accessed July 11, 2015 . 
2. ^ Ann Blackman: Spooks, shadows, codes, and moles: Spy wars, from inside the KGB. In: The Boston Globe . March 6, 2005, accessed July 9, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Interview with Sandy Grimes. In: gwu.edu . January 30, 1998, accessed July 9, 2015 . 
4. ^ Tennent H. Bagley: Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief. Skyhorse Publishing Inc., New York, 2013, ISBN 978-1-62636-065-5 .