most 500,000 died of hunger, overwork, or executionin 1935–1953.
There are very few memoirs of those who mined gold and timbered in
these camps, because few survived imprisonment. A Polish survivor of
the Kolyma camps summed up the experience with the Russian
proverb chelokek cheloveku volk(man is wolf to man).KOMITET INFORMATSII(KI).The Committee of Information was
created by Joseph Stalinin July 1947 to combine the foreign intelli-
gence components of the MGBand GRUinto one centralized for-
eign intelligence service. The KI was apparently created to mirror the
new American Central Intelligence Agency. The KI was initially
placed under the management of Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyach-
eslav Molotov. Soviet ambassadors were asked to serve as intelli-
gence rezidents, a job few of them coveted. Diplomats and intelli-
gence professionals alike hated the KI for confusing the roles of their
components. The KI was not a success and was disbanded in 1951.KOPATZKY, ALEKSANDR GRIGORYEVICH (1923–1982). One
of the most intriguing counterintelligencecases of the Cold Warin-
volved “Sasha” Kopatzky. Captured by the Germans while serving as
a Red Army officer, Kopatzky elected to remain behind after the war.
In 1946 he was invited to join the American-supervised German in-
telligence service, and two years later he married the daughter of a
German army officer. In 1949 Kopatzky, for reasons never satisfac-
torily explained, volunteered to the Soviet intelligence service and
began a long career as a double agent.
Kopatzky was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
in 1951 in Germany to work against the Soviet target. In 1957 he im-
migrated to the United States as “Igor Orlov” and continued to work
for the CIA. In the early 1960s he came under scrutiny by the CIA
and left intelligence work to open an art store in a suburb of Wash-
ington. In late 1961 Anatoli Golitsyndefected to the United States
and stated that a CIA employee with the code name “Sasha” was an
important KGBpenetration of the CIA. The CIA spent a great deal
of money and time over the next decade looking for Sasha. Kopatzky
was never prosecuted. He died in 1982, after he was identified by
name in a press article. His art store, run by his widow, was report-
edly a hangout for espionage writers for many years.KOPATZKY, ALEKSANDR GRIGORYEVICH (1923–1982) • 13506-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 135