Declassified data: how Soviet spies worked in different countries of the world

The director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, named the names of seven scouts who for many years supplied secret data to Moscow, posing as indigenous people in Europe, America and Asia. The official biographies of these people are extremely scarce. Edition with the BBC managed to collect a little more information about some of them.

Фото: Depositphotos

All the people whose names were made public served as the so-called illegal intelligence officers. These are people who were thrown by the USSR and Russia into other countries with fake documents for long battery life.

“Illegals” pretend to be born and raised in that or another friendly country and try to obtain secret information usually available only to the local political or military elite.

Vitaly Nuykin. "Relaxed and died"

Nuikin could become a diplomat. But in the last courses, representatives of the KGB came to the young man, offering to work abroad under a false name. Nuikin agreed, and then attracted his wife Lyudmila to espionage.

“My husband somehow casually asked me: would you like to work with someone else’s passport? And I say: why do I need someone else’s, I have my own good one. And we never talked about anything like that again. My husband was confident in me that I would follow him,” said Lyudmila Nuikina.

Posing as natives of French-speaking countries, the Nuikins were mainly engaged in industrial espionage, as well as collecting information about the political situation in Africa and Southeast Asia.

“We appear as if out of thin air. Out of nowhere. We are nobody and there is no way to call us,” this is how Lyudmila described the work rules of Soviet “illegal immigrants.”

At the beginning of his career, Vitaly and his wife were almost betrayed by the fact that they were extremely unusual for the abundance of goods in stores after contemplating half-empty stalls in the USSR.

“Remember when we had problems with toilet paper? And when I saw huge packs in the supermarket, I filled the entire cart with them. My husband told me right away: what are you doing? Put it in its place now,” Lyudmila later recalled.

The real names of the Nuikins, as well as the fact that they spy on the USSR, were reported to British intelligence by a double agent Oleg Gordievsky. He was friends with a couple and often visited them.

By the time counterintelligence tried to arrest the Nuikins, the couple had already acquired new fake documents and biographies. Illegals were not discovered immediately.

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Lyudmila managed to leave for the USSR a little earlier, and Vitaly, in order to avoid arrest, had to hide in the port for several days in the hold of a moored ship. On the way to the USSR, he almost drowned during a severe storm, but the ship was saved.

In 1997, Nuikin had a heart attack.

“He had a heart attack at the airport, but he forced himself to get behind the wheel of his car, drive to our clinic, stand in line for a medical card, and then relaxed a little. And clinical death occurred. It took him five hours to resurrect him and save him. After that, he lived for another year,” said Vitaly Nuikin’s wife 20 years after his death.

Eugene Kim. The tragedy of the colonel

The future spy was born into a Korean family in 1932 in the city of Kochan, Korea. So far, much more is known about Kim’s death than about his life. In 1998, in Moscow, a retired KGB colonel was hit by a car. The deceased did not have close relatives, so the state took over the organization of the funeral.

According to the memories representatives of the Korean diaspora in Russia, only nine Koreans gathered for Kim's funeral. But there were many times more representatives of the SVR: “The huge hall, about 200 people, was filled with funeral tables. Relatives were seated in a place of honor next to generals and colonels, veterans of the SVR.”

Kim began work at the KGB in the 1950s. For this I had to separate from my wife and son. Eugene worked in one of the Asian countries, posing as a local resident. The wife, on the other hand, had a typical Slavic appearance and did not have the ability for complex oriental languages.

In the mid-1950s, Kim's son, a teenager, accidentally drowned while swimming. After that, the wife decided to divorce Eugene.

“The illegal immigrant managed to escape to Moscow only for a day and immediately after the funeral, gritting his teeth, hurried to his place of duty,” says a story about an unnamed intelligence officer published in the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper in 2017. The details of this story largely coincide with the established facts of Kim's biography.

It also explains in general terms what path Kim took in an unnamed Asian country: “The first thing he saw after being dropped into a distant foreign country were endless boulders. Under one of them he found some peasant clothes hidden by someone. He had to build his new biography... He became one of the people. Having overcome incredible competition, he took a high position.”

In 1987, Colonel Kim was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union by secret decree.

Mikhail Vasenkov. Pianist father

In the West, Vasenkov is better known as a man who has for decades been impersonating Juan Lazaro.

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The first time his name pops up in 1976, when he arrived in the capital of Peru from Madrid. Lazaro claimed that he had come to Lima to study the local tobacco market for one of the Spanish companies.

Lazaro received Peruvian citizenship and made a successful career as a photographer. At one of the events, he met with the famous local TV journalist Vicki Pelaez. It was said that she fell in love with Lazaro at first sight. In 1983, they got married, then moved to the United States.

“Vicky, a Peruvian television star well known throughout Latin America, easily landed a position at one of the most famous Spanish-language newspapers in the United States, El Diario La Prensa, published in New York. Her husband defended his doctoral dissertation and received a teaching position at the prestigious Baruch College in New York. In addition, he also began to publish his political essays,” the Kommersant newspaper wrote about Vasenkov-Lazaro and his wife.

Apparently, Vasenkov’s work was going well. In 1990, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

In the USA, the couple had a son, Juan Jr. Since childhood, the boy showed great talent for playing the piano. Later he became a laureate of international competitions.

But real fame came to the Lazaro family in 2010, when Juan Sr., Vicki, and eight others were detained by the FBI on suspicion of collaborating with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. It is believed that Juana Lazaro was issued by the former SVR officer Oleg Poteev who switched to the US side.

In documents the FBI presented in court, Vasenkov-Lazaro and his wife worked to secure funding for a network of Russian “illegals” in the United States. At the same time, as reported, spies contacted Moscow the old fashioned way - using a Morse transmitter.

Vasenkov and his wife, as well as the rest of the scouts, were exchanged for four people who were detained in Russian prisons (among them was the former GRU colonel Sergei Skripal who was poisoned in Salisbury).

Vasenkov's son Juan Lazaro Jr. decided to stay in the United States. Now he continues his career as a pianist.

Intelligence Image

The SVR’s desire to reveal the names of seven of its spies at once is an unexpected and rare step, says Christian Gustafson, head of the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at British Brunel University.

Usually, intelligence agencies try to keep as secret as possible any information even about those agents that have been disclosed by foreign intelligence agencies.

“The fact that Moscow took such a step speaks of two things. First, they really need to improve the image of Russian intelligence inside Russia. We've heard quite a few stories over the last two years on the detention of Russian agents in Europe. The story with an attempt to poison Skripal “also can hardly be counted as an asset of Russia,” he says.

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“The clumsy operations of recent years were more often associated with military intelligence officers rather than with the SVR, but it was still important to strengthen the image of intelligence officers within Russia. In the end, the influx of new personnel into the intelligence services largely depends on this,” notes Gustafson.

The second reason for the publication of the names of spies is also related to domestic policy issues, the professor is sure.

“The ratings of Putin and other representatives of the Russian government are now not as high as before. And such a peculiar reference to the times of past glory can help improve the performance a little. Now stories about the successes of Soviet and Russian intelligence services will be heard everywhere. And Putin has always been positioned as coming from the KGB and intelligence,” adds Gustafson.

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