Key KGB officer was CIA’S first ‘exfiltration’
Key Cold War defector from Soviet soil
Throughout the 1970s, Victor Sheymov rose quickly through the hierarchy of the KGB, the spy agency of the Soviet Union.
By age 32, Sheymov was a major and in charge of the KGB’S flow of information from around the world. But he was growing disenchanted with life under the Communist regime.
At great risk, Sheymov finally made a daring escape with his wife and five- yearold daughter in 1980. It was the CIA’S first successful extraction — or exfiltration, as the agency calls it — of a defector from Soviet soil, and it became one of the most significant of the Cold War.
Sheymov, who spent the rest of his life in the States, died Oct. 18 of complications from pulmonary disease at his home in Vienna, Va. He was 73.
In the U.S., Sheymov spent a year debriefing intelligence officials about KGB secrets.
“My goal was to inflict as much damage on the communist system as I possibly could,” he told The Washington Post in 1990.
Sheymov disclosed that the KGB hatched a plot to kill Pope John Paul II, that the KGB assassinated Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in 1979, that two members of the U.S. State Department were KGB spies, and that there was a mole in the CIA.
Sheymov received the U.S. Intelligence Medal.
Victor Ivanovich Sheymov was born May 9, 1946, in Moscow. He joined the KGB in 1971. When he sought to flee the Soviet Union, he walked to the U. S. Embassy in Warsaw while on a KGB assignment in Poland.
It took more than two months before the escape plan — detailed in Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman’s 2015 book The Billion Dollar Spy — was ready.
On May 16, 1980, the Sheymovs left their apartment, took a train to a remote town, and climbed into a nondescript car, Sheymov wrote in his 1993 book, Tower of Secrets. Sheymov concealed himself and his sedated daughter in a hidden compartment between the car’s trunk and back seat. His wife posed as the driver’s girlfriend.
Sheymov eventually became a U.S. citizen. He maintained he’d been promised US$ 1 million for defecting and free lifetime health care, and though the CIA disputed that, they reached a settlement in 1999.