Yuri Schwez

Juri Borissowitsch Schwez ( Russian Юрий Борисович Швец ; * 1952 in Cherson ) is a former spy for the Soviet secret service KGB in the USA.

Life

Among other things, he has a degree in international law from the Moscow "University of Friendship of Peoples" (at the time " Patrice Lumumba University of Friendship of Peoples").

He received his training at the Military Academy of the KGB in the same class in which the future Russian President Vladimir Putin was. From the late 1970s to around 1990 he was an employee of the KGB with the rank of major in the First Headquarters (foreign operations). During this time he worked from April 1985 to 1987 in the KGB residency at the Soviet embassy in Washington DC , externally as a correspondent for the TASS news agency . Schwets recruited two key sources in the political scene there, one of which was later exposed as Claudia Wright, a journalist for the British weekly New Statesman , the identity and existence of the second, a member of the Jimmy Carter government with good connections to Greece, is still to this day controversial.

After Schwez published a book that describes his activities and his exit from the KGB, Schwets was banned from leaving the Soviet Union. In 1993 he secretly emigrated to the USA, where he now works as a lawyer. He is also a visiting professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CICentre).

In his book published in 1994, Schwez also published documents that confirm the existence of the so-called "Operation RJaN " in 1983. The "Operation RJaN" included an alert (never admitted by the Soviet Union) initiated in early November 1983 to all Soviet foreign agents in order to collect information about the very realistic NATO nuclear war maneuver Able Archer 83 held in Europe that year . With the agent information passed on to the Politburo every day, a nuclear counter-attack to the Warsaw Pact was to be prepared.

At the end of 2006, Schwez hit the headlines again in connection with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko , a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian domestic intelligence service ( FSB) and a critic of Russian President Putin , because he said he knew who was responsible for the crime and what his motive was be.

Works

• Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America . Simon & Schuster, New York 1994. ISBN 0-671-88397-6

Web links

• Information from the CICentre about Schwets , English
• ORF, December 11, 2006 , with links to the press sources cited there.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko Hearing, February 23, 2015, p. 34.