Oleg Kalugin

• 1. A Student in New York

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  In 1959, Newsweek ran a photograph of Oleg Kalugin, introduced to readers as a 24-year-old student in the United States. He told the magazine: "I like Americans very much. But after seven months here I am convinced more than ever that the Communist system is better than yours." It sounded like the boast of a loyal young Soviet abroad. Almost nothing about that portrait was what it seemed. Oleg Danilovich Kalugin would rise through the ranks of the KGB, fall out with it, and end up as a witness, an author and a target of its successors. This documentary asks what a young man was really doing in New York, how far he climbed, and why the country that trained him later put him on trial. It also asks what he has said about the people who came after him.

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• 2. Cover Stories

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  Born on the 6th of September 1934 in Leningrad, Kalugin was the son of an officer in the NKVD. He attended Leningrad State University, where the KGB recruited him into its First Chief Directorate, the branch responsible for foreign intelligence. After training, he was sent to the United States in 1958. His official identity was a journalism student at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, and Aleksandr Yakovlev came over with him.

  Radio Moscow supplied the next layer of disguise. Kalugin kept up the journalist pose for years and eventually served as the Radio Moscow correspondent at the United Nations. His five years in New York City ended in 1965, when he returned to Moscow. There he worked under the cover of a press officer in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. His next posting would be Washington, DC.

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• 3. The Youngest General

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  At the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, Kalugin held the title of deputy press officer. In reality he was deputy resident and acting chief of the KGB Residency inside the building. He kept rising until he counted among the agency's top officers working out of that embassy. In 1974 he was promoted to general, the youngest in the agency's history.

  He then returned to headquarters to lead the K branch, which handled foreign counterintelligence within the First Chief Directorate. High honors followed for the assassination of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov. According to the source, the killing was carried out after a request from Todor Zhivkov and an order from KGB chief Yuri Andropov. Andropov's circle would soon matter again, because one of his closest confidants was about to move against Kalugin.

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• 4. Fall From Favor

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  In 1980, Kalugin was demoted to deputy head of the Leningrad KGB. The cause was an intrigue started by Vladimir Kryuchkov, a close confidant of Andropov whom Kalugin had criticized in private. Kalugin was accused of having recruited, twenty years earlier, an agent who turned out to be an American spy. The KGB probably believed this wrongly, yet it made Kalugin look like a security risk. He was suspected of working for the CIA, but no evidence supported the suspicion.

  Kryuchkov, who would later orchestrate the 1991 coup plot, claimed that Kalugin failed to uncover a single US agent while running counterintelligence. His successor, the claim went, would find over a dozen. The former CIA mole Karl Koecher also made unsupported claims that Kalugin was responsible for his eventual arrest.

  The accusations did not silence him. Kalugin complained that the KGB overlooked corruption in the highest circles of Soviet society while it terrorized ordinary people. His open criticism led to reassignment as a security officer, first at the Academy of Sciences in 1987 and then at the Ministry of Electronics in 1988. His career ended with forced retirement on the 26th of February 1990.

  Under Mikhail Gorbachev, Kalugin grew louder. He denounced Soviet security forces as a Stalinist domestic political police, though he never disputed the value of espionage abroad. In 1990, Gorbachev signed a decree stripping him of his rank, decorations and pension. In August 1991, Gorbachev returned all three. Kalugin and Kryuchkov would meet on opposite sides again in that same year.

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• 5. Coup Days

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  In September 1990, over the opposition of the KGB, Kalugin was elected to the Supreme Soviet as a People's Deputy for the Krasnodar region. He became a firm supporter of Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. When the abortive Soviet coup attempt of 1991 began, under the leadership of KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Kalugin led crowds to the Russian White House. That building was the center of the effort against the plotters. He also induced Yeltsin to address the crowds.

  After the coup, Vadim Bakatin took over as the new KGB chairman, and Kalugin became his unpaid adviser. Kalugin told the press that the KGB should have no political functions and no secret laboratories for manufacturing poisons and secret weapons. Bakatin succeeded in dismantling the old security apparatus. He was fired in November 1991, before he had time to reform what remained. Within a few years, Kalugin would be living in Washington, D.C.

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• 6. Books, Games and Testimony

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  In 1994, Kalugin and Fen Montaigne published The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. One allegation held that the KGB ordered the poisoning that killed Sean Bourke, who had helped George Blake escape from prison. Another, as a review of the book put it, was that the KGB "virtually controlled the Russian Orthodox Church through the blackmail of its many gay priests". In a 2015 interview, Kalugin named the late Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow as a KGB collaborator. A second edition in 2009 added specifics about cases the first had covered only briefly.

  In 1995, Kalugin accepted a teaching position at The Catholic University of America and has remained in the United States ever since. A later book, Spymaster, followed. In 1996 he worked with former CIA Director William Colby and the company Activision on Spycraft: The Great Game, a CD-ROM game. He has appeared often in the media and lectured at a number of universities.

  Kalugin says he never betrayed any Soviet agents except those already known to Western intelligence. He called intelligence defectors such as Oleg Gordievsky "traitors."

  In June 2001, he testified at the espionage trial of George Trofimoff, a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve. Trofimoff was charged with spying for the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s. Asked whether he knew the name of the American military intelligence mole codenamed "Markiz," Kalugin answered: "Yes. I did. His name was George Trofimoff." He said Metropolitan Bishop Iriney (Susemihl), the Russian Orthodox hierarch of Austria, had recruited Trofimoff for the KGB. In 1978, Kalugin invited the Metropolitan to his dacha. In his words: "He did good work, particularly in recruiting Markiz. I wanted to thank him for what he had done." Kalugin also described meeting Trofimoff himself at a location in Austria. He explained that, as a resident alien, he was trying to obey American law. Trofimoff was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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• 7. The Putin Verdict

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  In 2002, a Moscow court tried Kalugin in absentia and found him guilty of spying for the West. The sentence was fifteen years in jail. A Russian court decision that year also stripped him of his rank and awards. Kalugin described the verdict as "Soviet justice, which is really triumphant today." He tied it to the return to power of elements of the KGB, most notably Vladimir Putin.

  The United States and Russia have no extradition treaty. The source adds that Washington would be unlikely to extradite Kalugin on such charges anyway. He stayed, and on the 4th of August 2003 he was sworn in as a naturalized citizen of the United States.

  As of 2019, Kalugin was a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, known as the CI CENTRE. He also sits on the advisory board of the International Spy Museum. Putin was once his subordinate, and Kalugin has called him a "war criminal" over the conduct of the Second Chechen War. He has predicted that Putin will face an international tribunal someday. In his telling, Putin will be severely penalized for crimes against the people of the North Caucasus, as former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was. In 2018, Kalugin turned his attention to another prominent figure, Donald Trump.

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• 8. The Trump Allegation

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  In 2018, Kalugin alleged that Donald Trump could have been a KGB-FSB asset ever since a visit to Moscow in 1987. By his account, the operation to lure Trump began with an overture in March 1986 from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations. In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes proudly of discussing a proposal to build a hotel in Moscow across from the Kremlin, "in partnership with the Soviet government." Vitaly Churkin was instrumental in setting up the deal with Intourist.

  Viktor Suvorov alleges that Soviet authorities often used Intourist prostitutes as bait to develop kompromat, particularly of a sexual nature. The New York Times reported that Trump met Mikhail Gorbachev while in Moscow in July 1987.

  Kalugin's own words are conditional: "I would not be surprised if the Russians have, and Trump knows about them, files on him during his trip to Russia and his involvement with meeting young ladies that were controlled by Soviet intelligence." The claim rests on that single trip in July 1987, and Kalugin frames it as something that would not surprise him rather than something he has shown.

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