transfer of the republic’s gold supply, worth over $700 million in
1937 dollars, to Moscow, where it remained for four decades. As
Stalin’s rolling purge of the NKVD intensified in 1938, Orlov real-
ized that he was slated for executionand decided to defect. He trav-
eled with his wife and mortally ill child to the United States in the
summer of 1938 and was interviewed by a senior State Department
official. Orlov identified himself as a general of state security with
important information. He was next interviewed some 15 years later
by American counterintelligence.
Orlov worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) in the 1950s and wrote two best-selling books on Stalin’s ter-
ror. He also testified before U.S. congressional committees as an ex-
pert witness. But his story has a dramatic posthumous postscript: in
the 1990s, two decades after Orlov’s death, the KGBreleased his file
and claimed that Orlov had never betrayed key agents but had re-
mained true to his service. A book by Orlov’s FBI handler predictably
and dramatically rejected these assertions, claiming that Orlov had
served the FBI as faithfully for 20 years as he had the Soviet service
previously. There is no final verdict on this case, but given the in-
complete nature of the Soviet files and the desire to protect the repu-
tation of their service, Moscow’s claims seem spurious.OVAKIMYAN, GAIK BADALOVICH (1898–1975).Known to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the “wily Armenian,”
Ovakimyan served as theNKVDcase officer and illegalrezident
in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Ovakimyan’s
greatest success was in the recruitment of agents with access to sci-
entific and industrial information. In 1939 Ovakimyan’s reziden-
turasent 18,000 pages of technical documents to Moscow. By
1941 the NKVD network in the United States, for which he laid the
basic building blocks, included 221 agents. In May 1941, however,
the FBI caught Ovakimyan in the act of espionage. After a brief
imprisonment, he was allowed to return to Moscow, where he
served as a general officer in the NKVD. Many of Ovakimyan’s
stable of recruits provided critical information about U.S. military
technology during and immediately after World War II. Follow-
ing the war, Ovakimyan left the intelligence service and went back
into scientific work.OVAKIMYAN, GAIK BADALOVICH (1898–1975) • 18506-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 185