The man who ran the illegals
SOVIET SPYMASTER’S CAREER SPANNED ALMOST THE ENTIRE COLD WAR
They were known as the illegals, men and women who adopted the identities of the dead, worked as priests, poets, actors and inventors, and quietly gathered intelligence for the Soviet Union during the long years of the Cold War.
Based in nondescript American suburbs and bustling European capitals, they spent up to two decades developing the trust of their neighbours and employers while stealing secret information about nuclear weapons, missile systems, Western intelligence efforts and political intrigue.
At the helm of their organization, a secretive wing of the KGB known as Directorate S, was a balding man with the rank of major- general and the name of Yuri Drozdov. A Second World War veteran who led an assault in Afghanistan in 1979 and helped arrange a high-profile spy exchange in 1960s Berlin, he died June 21 at 91.
The Foreign Intelligence Service, a KGB successor, announced his death but did not provide additional details.
Gen. Drozdov oversaw t he KGB’s illegals program—its name distinguished it from the agency’s “legal” spy program, in which agents maintained diplomatic connections to the Soviet motherland — from 1979 until 1991, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR. It was the capstone of a career that spanned nearly the entire Cold War, from the “bridge of spies” in Berlin to undercover in China at the start of Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution.
Yet despite spending much of his career behind the scenes, Drozdov was not afraid to involve himself in “wet affairs,” the KGB term for assassinations, beatings, poison- tipped umbrella murders and similar acts. It was Drozdov who led KGB forces in the December, 1979, assault on the palace of Afghan president Hafizullah Amin, a 43-minute surprise attack that resulted in Amin’s death and launched a Soviet invasion of the country. The operation resulted in the deaths of 55 Soviet operatives, 37 of them from an aircraft crash, and of 180 Afghans, according to Jonathan Haslam, a historian of the Soviet Union’s intelligence efforts. One Russian leader later described the attack as “perfect” and “absolutely unprecedented.”
Several days after the battle, Drozdov recommended that thenKGB leader Yuri Andropov create a new special- forces unit within the agency, allowing it to professionalize its wet-affairs operations. Known by the name Vympel (“pennant”), the new unit was formally created under Drozdov in 1981 and went on to perform operations in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Drozdov focused mainly on the illegals program in later years, identifying recruits (“wunderkinds,” he called them) capable of excelling in the program’s yearslong training regimen. “We have our process of raising them,” he told The New York Times in 2010, declining to provide additional details. “You have your Dr. Spock method; we have our own ways.”
Jason Matthews, a former CIA officer, said the illegals program was similar to that of television hit The Americans. KGB leaders such as Drozdov would develop “legends” for each illegal and scour cemeteries to find the names of dead children whose birth years closely matched those of the agents. Some agents were assigned official wives to help them blend in.
The technique was time- consuming and not always productive, Matthews said, and was not used by the CIA. “Can you imagine the director of PR telling any Western officer, ‘ You’ve got to go to China and live with a wife we’ve selected for you for 20 years?’”
Still, undercover illegals have been discovered in the U. S. as recently as June, 2010, when 10 alleged spies were arrested by the FBI in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Arlington, Va. Six were using the names of dead people, and all 10 were sent to Russia in a spy swap for four Russians convicted of aiding the West.
Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov was born in Minsk on Sept. 19, 1925. Details on his early life are vague. According to Haslam’s book Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, his father at one time served in the czarist army, and Drozdov served in the Soviet army at the close of the Second World War. He joined the KGB in 1956 and was initially based in East Germany, where he refined his language skills and claimed to have studied at a theatre school “to learn the art of impersonation.”
Drozdov played a minor role arranging the 1962 trade of Francis Gary Powers, a downed American spy-plane pilot, for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, a member of the illegals program who had purportedly stolen nuclear secrets from the U. S. In a scene that inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film Bridge of Spies, Drozdov stood on a bridge between West and East Berlin as Abel returned to the Soviet-controlled side.
Drozdov came to the U. S. in 1975, where he took charge of Soviet intelligence in New York before being named head of Directorate S. He seemed to retain a fondness for Americans, with whom he collaborated in business after the fall of the Soviet Union.
His company, Namacon ( sometimes spelled Namakon), provided political analysis. At one point it also manufactured airplane tires before seeming to find a niche at finding office space and performing background checks for Western businesses in Russia.
Skills he learned as a spy sometimes came in handy. “In my KGB career I had much experience at getting enemies to do my will,” he told Forbes magazine in 1994, “and I thought this would be very useful in business.”
WE HAVE A SAYING IN BOTSWANA: A MAN IS NEVER STRONG UNTIL HE SAYS WHAT HE BELIEVES AND GIVES OTHER MEN THE CHANCE TO DO THE SAME. I AM PROUD TO SAY WITHOUT A DOUBT . . . WE ARE A STRONG DEMOCRACY. — KETUMILE MASIRE