Yuri Drozdov
Dreaded KGB spymaster who ran the unit set up to ‘liquidate’ enemies of Russia abroad
YURI DROZDOV, who died aged 91 on June 21, was a square-jawed former KGB major-general who did undercover work in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Cold War Berlin.
He also led KGB forces in the assault in December 1979 on the palace of the Afghan president Hafizullah Amin, the start of the Soviet invasion; ran a covert KGB unit whose officers were trained to “liquidate” people abroad, and later, until the end of the Soviet empire, and ran its infamous Directorate S, responsible for “illegals” — agents abroad working under deep cover, often for years.
Moscow began using illegals in the years after the 1917 revolution when few countries recognised the communist regime and so non-diplomatic agents had to be used abroad.
The KGB would develop identities known as “legends” and visit Western cemeteries to find the names of dead children whose birth years closely matched those of the agents.
Illegals lacked support from Russia and communicated with it only infrequently. Because of this, they spent much more time on keeping up their false identities and were unable to take big risks.
Oleg Gordievsky, the former deputy head of the KGB, said in a 2010 interview that illegals often failed to deliver intelligence as good as their colleagues who worked in the open. Drozdov, however, claimed that there had been more than one case of a Soviet illegal ending up as an ambassador for another country.
Illegals whom Drozdov knew or worked with included Konon Molody, better known in Britain as Gordon Lonsdale, a serial womaniser who set up in business selling and renting jukeboxes, bubblegum and gambling machines — and went on to mastermind the Portland Spy Ring. The most famous illegal was Rudolph Abel — the Soviet agent who obtained many of America’s atomic secrets in the 1950s.
In a scene that inspired the film Bridge of Spies (2013), Drozdov stood on the Glienicke Bridge linking West Berlin with Soviet-controlled Potsdam, as Abel returned to the Soviet-controlled side.
Drozdov later claimed Abel had been replaced by another illegal, code-named Georgy, who had spied in the US for 15 years before returning home.
According to a former Soviet military intelligence officer, it was Drozdov who proposed the creation of an undercover KGB assassination unit, which was secretly approved by the Soviet Politburo in 1981. It was called Vympel (“pennant”).
Gordievsky recalled that when he was the KGB’s chief of station in London in 1985, Drozdov told him to find empty houses to hide people or weapons and to pick out suit- able places for caches of wireless transmitters, canned food, and identity papers — suggesting the KGB was planning for future Vympel operations.
Drozdov was born on September 19, 1925, in Minsk. He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and trained at artillery school. In 1945 he took part in the storming of Berlin.
After graduating from the Military College of Foreign Languages in 1956, he was invited to work for the KGB but initially turned them down. “I thought it was impossible,” he told Reuters. “Baldness is a distinguishing feature.”
But he soon gave in. He was based in East Germany, then served as a KGB resident under diplomatic cover in Beijing from 1964 to 1968, and in the late 1970s, he took charge of the Soviet intelligence station in New York. He became head of Directorate S in 1979.
After communism fell in 1989, Drozdov founded a business consultancy, providing political analysis and running background checks for western businesses in Russia.
He is survived by his wife and two sons.