164 • DZHIRKVELOV, ILYA
chivesand attended the Higher Party School in the evenings. His ca-
reer had taken an unexpected turn following the disclosure that his
father, whom he had never known, had not died at sea in the way
described by his mother. In fact he had been executed in 1937, while
serving a 10-year prison sentence for undefined political offenses.
Nevertheless, in August 1952, he was rehabilitated and transferred to
the FCD’s American department. Later he moved to the newly
formed Second Chief Directorate, responsible for the surveillance of
suspect foreigners in Moscow, specializing in diplomats from Iran,
Egypt, and Turkey. In 1955 he returned to the FCD’s Tenth Depart-
ment, monitoring the Turkish frontier and liaising with the Georgian
KGB in Tbilisi, and in August 1957 was back in Moscow with the
Second Chief Directorate.
As part of his cover, Dzhirkvelov worked forSoviet Sportand be-
came general secretary of the Union of Journalists of the USSR, a
post he held from 1957 until September 1965 when he joined the
TASS news agency. He was assigned as the agency’s correspondent
to Zanzibar, where he arrived with his wife in September 1967. There
they remained until early 1970, when they moved to Dar-es-Salaam
temporarily before taking up a permanent post in Khartoum in May.
The Dzhirkvelovs spent just over two years in the Sudan and in April
1974 flew to Geneva as a press officer for the UN World Health Or-
ganization. This attractive posting came as a surprise because in that
year Dzhirkvelov’s name had been listed in John Barron’sKGB: The
Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agentsas aKGBasset who had been
expelled from Turkey and had been spotted in the Sudan in 1971.
On New Year’s Day 1980, after a minor traffic accident, Dzhirk-
velov was accused of drunk driving. He denied the charge but when
he declined to resign and insisted on completing his contract, which
was due to run until May 1981, he was recalled to Moscow in March.
Within hours of landing, he learned that his career was in ruins, so
without waiting for the final interview—at which he knew he would
be confined to Moscow—he hastily flew to Vienna and took a train
back to Geneva where he explained his predicament to his wife and
daughter. The same day, all three were granted political asylum in
Great Britain.
In his autobiography,Secret Servant, published in 1988, Dzhirk-
velov described himself as a reluctantdefector. ‘‘I was lucky. Had I