Boris Yuzhin

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Boris Yuzhin (born February 21, 1942[1]) is a former Soviet spy. He was a mole in the KGB, spying for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1970s and 1980s before being caught and imprisoned.

Yuzhin was assigned by the KGB to monitor student activities under the cover of a Tass correspondent.[1]

In 1978 he began working for the FBI. He revealed the existence of the KGB's Group North, an "elite unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide." [2]

Yuzhin worked at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.. The KGB discovered that Yuzhin was a mole in 1985, first when CIA officer Aldrich Ames identifed him (as well as Valery F. Martinov and Sergei Motorin, also KGB officers based in the Soviet embassy in Washington) and later when FBI mole Robert Hanssen confirmed that the three were working for U.S. intelligence a few months later, in his first letter to his Soviet handlers on October 1, 1985.

Martinov and Motorin, who were more senior KGB, were recalled to Moscow and executed.[1] Yuzhin returned to Moscow for reassignment and was arrested in 1986. He spent six years of a 15-year sentence in Perm 35, a Siberian gulag.[1] According to one of Yuzhin's former FBI handlers, Yuzhin escaped execution because he was "never in residency in the KGB offices" and was able to "convince his interrogators he knew nothing about operations and cases."[1] He was released on February 7, 1992[2] after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when President Boris Yeltsin issued a general amnesty for political prisoners.[1] Yuzhin immigrated to the United States, where the FBI helped him resettle in the San Francisco Bay area.[1]

Both Ames and Hanssen were captured on February 21, Yuzhin's birthday—Ames in 1994 and Hanssen in 2001.[1] The day before Hanssen's arrest, Yuzhin received "a cryptic call" from an FBI contact telling him to "Watch the news tomorrow."[1]

Described as "mild-mannered," Yuzhin currently lives in Santa Rosa in northern California and is supported by a "modest government stipend." [1] He lives with his wife Nadia and grown daughter Olga, an occupational therapist.[1][2] According to reports his "mother, sister and a married son, an economist, with children of his own, live in Russia...Yuzhin has not been back to Russia since his release from prison in 1992, but his son and grandchildren come for visits."[1] He "does historical research and augments his income with occasional lectures," including one lecture in October 2000 to the Southern California Fraud Investigation Association in Palm Springs, California, where Yuzhin spoke on "the Russian Mind."[1]

Yuzhin has also worked with Susan Mesinai and the Ark Project on researching the cases of other former Soviet political prisoner, including Raoul Wallenberg and NSA cryptanalyst Victor Norris Hamilton, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 and was discovered in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 1992.[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Blumenthal, Ralph. "Spy drama survivor watches as story unfolds." New York Times. 23 Feb. 2001. A14.
  2. ^ a b c Wise, David. "Victims of Aldrich Ames." Time. 22 May 1995. [1]
  3. ^ American defector is found in Russian prison." New York Times. 4 June 1992.
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