Yuri Drozdov
Dreaded KGB spymaster who ran ‘illegals’ abroad and proposed the creation of an assassination unit
YURI DROZDOV, who has died aged 91, was a balding, square-jawed former KGB major-general who did undercover work in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Cold War Berlin; 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, ran its infamous Directorate S, responsible for “illegals” – agents abroad working under deep cover, often for years, in their assigned countries.
Moscow began using illegals in the years after the 1917 revolution when few countries recognised the communist regime and so nondiplomatic agents had to be used abroad. The system was refined over the years, with candidates undergoing rigorous training lasting between five and seven years to prepare them for an isolated life in deep cover.
The KGB would develop fictional identities known as “legends” and visit western cemeteries to find the names of dead children whose birth years closely matched those of the agents. Some were assigned official wives to help them blend in. Western agencies had no equivalent, perhaps because the prospect of spending years undercover on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, possibly with a wife assigned by the agency, was not one designed to appeal to even the most ardent Cold Warrior. “The illegal is an art form best executed by Russians,” observed the espionage writer Nigel West in 1993.
There remains some doubt over their effectiveness. Illegals lacked support from their home country and only communicated with it 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 they 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, was convicted of espionage in 1957 and freed in 1962 in exchange for captured American spy plane pilot Gary Powers. In a scene that inspired Steven Spielberg’s 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 that Abel had been replaced by another illegal, code-named Georgy, who had spied in the US for 15 years before returning home. “Foreign intelligence agencies still do not know his name,” he told a Russian military journal in 1999.
According to the former Soviet military intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, 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”) and under Drozdov’s leadership its specialists were trained in foreign languages and the history and customs of the countries to which they were assigned.
Oleg Gordievsky recalled that when he was the KGB’S chief of station in London in 1985, Drozdov told him to find empty houses in Britain that could be used to hide people or weapons and to pick out suitable places for caches of wireless transmitters, canned food, hand arms and ammunition, and identity papers – suggesting that the KGB was planning for future Vympel operations.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in
2006, shortly after Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by polonium 210 in London, Volodarsky claimed that Vympel lived on in Putin’s Russia as Directorate V, the special operations group inside the FSB.
Meanwhile in 2010 there was shock when the FBI arrested 10 alleged Russian “illegals” who had spent years adopting American identities and gathering an array of intelligence, from information about nuclear weapons to the gold market and personnel changes at the CIA.
Some of the agents lived as married couples and had children who had grown up as Americans unaware that their parents were Russian. The 10 were sent to Russia later that year, in a spy swap for four Russians convicted of aiding the West.
Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov was born on September 19 1925 in Minsk. His father was a former officer of the Imperial Russian Army who had joined the Red Army after the revolution. Yuri was drafted to the Army in 1943 and trained at artillery school. In 1945 he took part in the storming of Berlin.
When, after graduating from Moscow’s Military College of Foreign Languages in 1956, he was invited to work for the KGB, initially he turned them down. “I thought it was impossible,” he told Reuters in a later interview. “Baldness is a distinguishing feature.”
But he soon gave in to pressure. He was initially based in East Germany, where he claimed to have studied at a theatre school “to learn the art of impersonation”, though when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 he was on leave.
He went on to serve as KGB resident under diplomatic cover in Beijing, from 1964 to 1968, and in the late 1970s took charge of the Soviet intelligence station in New York. He became head of Directorate S in 1979.
It was at the end of that year, shortly after he had led KGB forces in a 43-minute surprise attack on the presidential Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassination of the Afghan president Hafizullah Amin, that Drozdov recommended the creation of the Vympel unit to Yuri Andropov. Vympel quickly gained the reputation of being among the best Soviet special forces units and was known to have performed operations in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Drozdov could not recall where he was when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but according to Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel in Bombshell (1997), as the Soviet empire crumbled, he was busily involved in scrubbing KGB records of details that might identify any surviving Manhattan Project spies, after Vadim Kirpichenko, the KGB head of foreign intelligence, gave an interview in which he asserted for the first time what had long been suspected – that Klaus Fuchs was not the only major spy in the project.
After the fall of communism, Drozdov founded a business consultancy, Namakon, providing political analysis and running background checks for western businesses in Russia.
Yuri Drozdov is survived by his wife and two sons.
Yuri Drozdov, born September 19 1925, died June 21 2017