Igor Orlov

Igor Orlow , original name Alexander Kopazky , (* 1923 , † 1982 ) was a Soviet double agent who was exposed in 1961 by Anatoly Golitsyn . His Soviet aliases were Erwin, Herbert and Richard.

Orlov was drafted into a Soviet training school for agents of the NKVD in 1941 after the beginning of the German-Soviet war . In October 1943, after a parachute jump over occupied Kresy, he was arrested by the German Wehrmacht and taken prisoner of war . From 1944 he was used as an agent in the Foreign Armies department against the Red Army and was a member of the Vlasov Army under the name Alexander (Sascha) Kopazky . In 1945 he became an American prisoner of war, in which he came into contact with the Gehlen organization .

He later married Eleonore Stirner, the daughter of a former SS member.

Because of fabricated reports, the Gehlen organization switched him off as an agent in 1948, but was taken over by the American secret service CIA for further use.

From 1949 the KGB recruited him as one of its most important double agents. The CIA sent him to Greater Berlin in 1951 under the name Franz Koischwitz . Here, too, he was officially shut down as an agent at the end of 1951, but was still employed. On November 7, 1951 he kidnapped the Estonian CIA agent Vladimir Kiwi from West Berlin to East Berlin on behalf of the KGB . In 1954 he changed his name to Igor Orlov for camouflage reasons with the help of the CIA . From 1957 he completed an agent training in the USA and was deployed again in Europe from 1958. In 1960 he was transferred back to the USA.

As a result of the transfer of the former top KGB agent Anatoly Golitsyn and his statements, the FBI investigated him. After an apartment search in 1965, he fled to the Soviet consulate for a short time. Since his wife refused to flee to the Soviet Union, he left it and stayed in the USA.

Until his death in 1982 he lived there undisturbed and owned a gallery.

literature

• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .
• George Bailey: The Invisible Front. Ullstein, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-548-26569-3 .
• Joseph J. Trento: The Secret History of the CIA. Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York 2005, ISBN 0-7867-1500-6 .