war, a GRUofficer of Turkic nationality, Ismail Akhmedov, refused
to return to Moscow and remained in Turkey, fearing punishment for
operational errors. Other officials sought to remain in the United
States. The most important of these early defections occurred in Sep-
tember 1945, when Igor Gouzenko, a GRU code clerk in Canada,
defected, providing critical information about the scope of Soviet in-
telligence operations in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Defections continued through the post-Stalinist period as GRU and
KGBofficers crossed the lines. Often they came because of concerns
about party or service bureaucratic rivalries. In January 1954, a week
after Lavrenty Beria’s execution, Yuri Rastvorov, a KGB officer
serving in Tokyo, defected to avoid recall to Moscow. Most of these
men and women were also motivated by personal concerns—charges
of poor performance, unhappy marriages, or simply a desire to live
better in the West. Some, like Oleg Gordievskiy, defected for ideo-
logical reasons. The Western intelligence services also harvested de-
fectors from Moscow’s East European satellites as military attachés,
diplomats, and case officers sought sanctuary in the West through the
course of the Cold War. The most important of these East Europeans
was Michael Goleniewski, who exposed KGB operations through-
out Europe. A number of Czech intelligence officers defected in 1968
following the Soviet intervention.
Defectors provided Western counterintelligenceservices with im-
portant sources of information on Soviet intelligence agents and their
tradecraft, as well as political and military information. They often,
however, created major problems for their hosts, who found the han-
dling of former intelligence officers difficult. Anatoli Golitsyn’s
misleading information about KGB operations destroyed the careers
of several senior Central Intelligence Agency officers and led to the
illegal incarceration of another defector, Yuri Nosenko.
The care and feeding of defectors was not easy for either the
United States or the Soviet Union. Some of the British defectors,
such as Kim Philbyand Donald Maclean, believed they did not re-
ceive the respect or the work in Moscow that they deserved. A num-
ber of Soviet defectors in the West returned to the Soviet Union, most
notably Vitaliy Yurchenko. Dealing with the egos and fears of those
who changed sides was an art form neither side totally mastered.64 •DEFECTORS06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 64