A clue or two from Lithuania

Substacker Filip Kovacevic told us in a 28 April 2022 Wilson Center article that he’d found KGB Major General Valentin Zvezdenkov’s four-page autobiography in Lithuania’s KGB files, and that as a result it now looked as though the KGB had already determined by late November 1958 that GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov was a traitor.

From said autobiography, we learn that Zvezdenkov was transferred to East Berlin as Chief of the KGB’s “Illegals” program in September 1957, a few months after Popov had been transferred there in his new position as chief of the GRU’s analog Illegals program, and, most importantly, that he returned to Moscow to run the KGB’s operation against Popov in November 1958, just five days before Popov was recalled to Moscow on a ruse, secretly arrested, and played back against the CIA for about a year.

(Popov was publicly arrested in Moscow on 16 October 1959, tried, and executed in 1960.)

We already knew that in October 1957 — during the period of time that Zvezdenkov was in East Berlin monitoring Popov — GRU Lt. Col Dmitry Polyakov, who in late 1961 would implausibly “walk in” to the FBI’s NYC field office and volunteer to spy for it at the U.N. right when all of the KGB/GRU officers who had been in contact with Popov were being recalled to Moscow, escorted a NYC-bound “Illegal,” Margarita Tairova, to Popov for him so dispatch to The West, and that when she quickly bolted from The Big Apple and returned to Moscow claiming that the FBI had monitored her all the way from Paris, suspicion fell upon him for having notified U.S. Intelligence that she was coming (which he did) — but his Moscow interrogators ostensibly believed him and let him go, so he returned to East Berlin and resumed running the GRU’s Illegals program.

Kovacevic takes the fact that high-level Zvendenkov was transferred to East Berlin a few months after Popov was transferred there and had returned to Moscow just five days before Popov was permanently recalled in late November 1958 as an indication that the KGB had already uncovered Popov by that date.

He’s right, of course, because we know from Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, and John M. Newman’s 2022 book, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, that Popov was betrayed by a mole in Washington, D.C., movie houses way back in January 1957.

Details: Bagley says by Popov’s recently fired-by-CIA incompetent and honey-trapped dead drop setter-upper in Moscow, Edward Ellis Smith, whereas Newman says by Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, Bruce Leonard Solie in the mole-hunting Office of Security -- with logistical support from Ed Smith and Security officer James McCord of future Watergate notoriety.

Factoids: After Popov was recalled and secretly arrested and “transferred” to the KGB’s Transportation Corps as a “full colonel,” he got a message to the CIA that he wanted to meet with his handler, Russell Langelle. When he and Langelle met in the men’s room of a Moscow restaurant in September of 1959, he slipped him a (KGB-written) note which said he had been under KGB control since February 1959, that he was uncovered due to the KGB’s seeing an American diplomat (George Winters) mail a letter to him, and that Zvezdenkov had interrogated him.

I take the fact that Popov’s CIA handler in West Berlin, Russia-born George Kisevalter, didn’t tell him that Zvezdenkov had just returned to Moscow — and therefore that he would risk being arrested if he obeyed the order to return to Moscow — is just more evidence that Kisevalter was a KGB mole.

To wit: both of Kisevalter’s most important charges, Popov and Penkovsky, were uncovered and executed, Kisevalter supported false-defector-in-place-in-Geneva-in-June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, Yuri Nosenko, against the accusations of Nosenko’s primary case officer, Tennent H. Bagley, and his anti-Bagley / pro-Nosenko claims in the folksy “biography” of him by his friend, business partner and former CIA analyst, Clarence Ashley, are so numerous and so implausibly contradictory to what Bagley wrote in his 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, “Ghosts of the Spy Wars,” and his 2013 book Spymaster (about his friend, former KGB General Sergey Kondrashev), as to cause one to seriously question the old high-level chess player’s loyalties.


That’s it.

That’s the post.