The Two Sashas

Background: In Slavic countries, the nickname for Alexander is “Sasha.” In Moscow in 1951, when KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn was furtively reading about a Soviet mole in the CIA by the name of Alexander Kopatzky, he mistook his nickname, “Sasha,” for his codename.


Sasha # 1 — Igor Orlov, aka Alexander Kopatzky

On 15 December 1961, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the CIA in Helsinki when he showed up unannounced at the house of Chief of Station Frank Friberg with his wife, young daughter, and a bag full of KGB documents.

The CIA flew them to Sweden that night, where they transferred to another plane which was supposed to fly them non-stop to Washington but which had to be diverted to Germany due to bad weather. While on the way to Germany, Golitsyn told one of his escorts that he feared for his life because he believed there was a KGB mole codenamed SASHA in Germany who might try to assassinate him. Unbeknownst to Golitsyn, “Sasha” was now in the U.S., having recently retired from the CIA under a more recently assumed name, “Igor Orlov.” According to James Angleton’s 10/5/78 HSCA testimony, the escort unwisely cabled CIA headquarters the above information without severely restricting its dissemination at CIA headquarters.


DEVIOUS IGOR

“Alexander “Sasha” Kopatzky,” was an NKVD agent during WW II who was instructed to let himself be captured with his radio in German territory so that he could penetrate Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence division and Vlasov’s anti-Stalin Army. After the war, he ostensibly “flipped” to the OSS / CIA in West Germany, from where he seems to have specialized in recruiting anti-Stalin Soviets to send to their deaths in the USSR. After having a car accident in Germany in 1961, the CIA moved his wife and him to the U.S. and, shortly thereafter, laid him off.

When he got wind of the above-mentioned warning by Golitsyn in late December 1961, Kopatzky, now in Washington and calling himself Igor Orlov, sent a letter to the Agency accusing his former CIA boss in Frankfurt, Army Major Alexander “Sasha” Sogolow, of being a KGB “mole.” Sogolow confessed, was played back against the KGB, and never prosecuted.

A 1978 handwritten CIA report of an interview of Sogolow and his former colleagues in the Soviet Russia Division’s SR/10 (Legal Travellers) department about a controversial 11/25/63 memo in which a CIA officer, Jacques Richardson, working under the pseudonym Thomas B. Casasin, said that he had considered using Lee Harvey Oswald as an agent in the USSR, says that from 1954 - May 1959, Sogolow was Chief of SR/10, and that “from 1954 to 1967 he did SR/10 work from [deleted].”

Sogolow told the interviewer that he never would have used Lee Harvey Oswald because he wasn’t college-educated. Another interesting factoid is that Sogolow was journalist Patricia Johnson’s CIA contact in Frankfurt when she was on her way to Moscow on 29 November 1956 (she would famously interview Oswald in Moscow in November 1959).

A few days after arriving in the U.S., Golitsyn told probable “mole” Bruce Solie in the Office of Security that “Sasha’s” surname started with a “K” and ended with “-ski” or “-sky.” Solie showed Golitsyn a list of CIA personnel who had been stationed in Germany and who fit that description, but he evidently left Kopatzky’s name off the list, thereby causing Golitsyn to choose Peter Karlow — whose original family name was “Klibanski” — instead. A short time later, Karlow was fired from the CIA.


KITTY HAWK ARRIVES

In 1965, a Kremlin-loyal KGB triple-agent by the name of Igor Kochnov (allegedly the son-in-law of the politically most powerful woman in the USSR — Yekaterina Furtseva) contacted the FBI without CIA’s knowledge, and, a year later, called Richard Helms at home and offered to work with the Agency in order to advance his KGB career. All he needed the CIA to do was provide him with Nicholas Shadrin (former name Artamonov), a Soviet destroyer captain who had defected to the U.S. several years earlier. Chief of CIA Counterintelligence James Angleton, relying on Bruce Solie’s advice that the Soviet Russia Division was penetrated by “Popov’s U-2 Mole” / “Popov’s Mole” and believing Kochnov to be a provocation, decided to “play” him back against the KGB by having Solie and FBI agent Elbert Turner handle him.

Kochnov “convinced” Solie that Yuri Nosenko was a true defector, and, according to Tennent H. Bagley, confirmed Solie’s 1965 assessment that already-retired Orlov was the “Sasha” that Golitsyn and Angleton had been looking for. By so doing, Kochnov elevated Solie’s status in the CIA as well as his own “bona fides.” Shadrin was persuaded by his friend, CIA Deputy Director Admiral Stansfield Turner, to pretend to allow himself to be “recruited” by Kochnov as part of Angleton’s game, and a few years later probable moles Solie and Leonard V. McCoy managed to lose him to KGB kidnappers in Vienna when they, despite Angleton’s entreaties to never let Shadrin leave the country, allowed him to go there for a meeting with Kochnov.


Sasha # 2 — Alexander “Sasha” Sogolow

When KGB false-defector Yuri Nosenko physically defected to the U.S. in early 1964, he volunteered that he’d heard that the KGB had recruited a U.S. American Army captain (sic) in Germany, and that his codename was “Sasha.” This eventually turned out to be the above-mentioned Army Major, Alexander Sogolow. As I said above, Sogolow confessed, was “played back” against the KGB, and not prosecuted. David Wise wrote in his 1992 book, Molehunt,

The case of the Army major, while not very important in itself in the annals of the Cold War, illustrates the complexity of the world of counterintelligence. Golitsyn warned of a Sasha in the CIA, Nosenko warned of a Sasha in the military, who was identified with the help of a third KGB officer [Kochnov] whose provenance remains unresolved to this day (sic; Bagley has shown that Kochnov was Kremlin-loyal all along).

. . . . . . . .

It’s interesting to note that Nosenko told Bagley and probable mole George Kisevalter in Geneva in early 1964 that there was a Kremlin-loyal mole codenamed SASHA in Germany, but got the mole’s rank wrong, making it impossible to uncover him. This is what Bagley wrote in his 2007 book, Spy Wars:

Nosenko volunteered another item. He had heard that the KGB had recruited an American army officer in Germany, a captain. The KGB codename was SASHA.

“Tell us what you know, please,” I said. “There are a lot of captains in Germany.”

He seemed not to remember that we had asked him about this code name, among other,s in 1962, when he drew a blank on it.

"That’s all I heard, just that,” he shrugged.

"How did you hear about this?”

He could not remember. A couple more questions made it clear that he could add nothing, not even to specify whether the case was still active. This was too vague even to begin investigating.