Vladimir Vetrov

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Colonel Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov (1928 - 1983?) was a KGB defector during the Cold War, who passed on to NATO extremely valuable information about the Soviet program to obtain technology from the West. He was code-named Farewell by the French intelligence service DST, which recruited him, and he was known by this name throughout NATO intelligence services.

Vetrov first encountered France when he was posted there in 1965 as a Line X officer working for the KGB's Directorate T, which specialized in obtaining advanced information about science and technology. While there, a French businessman he knew helped him out of jam when he damaged an official car; this started a friendship which was to have significant consequences. He stayed in this posting for 5 years before returning to Moscow.

There, he rose through the ranks of Directorate T, eventually becoming responsible for supervising the evaluation of the intelligence collected by Line X agents around the world, and passing the information on to the relevant users inside the Soviet Union.

However, he became increasingly dis-illusioned with the Communist system, and decided to defect for purely ideological reasons (he never accepted payment for his material). At the end of 1980, he contacted the French businessman, and volunteered his services to the West.

Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982 he handed over to the DST almost 4,000 secret documents, including the complete official list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world.

Among the information he provided was a complete breakdown of the organization of the Soviet effort for collecting scientific and technical information, which included elements of the GRU, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and several other bodies. In addition, he provided summaries on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. His information also identified nearly 100 leads to sources in 16 countries.

His career came to an end in February 1982 when, while drinking champagne in his parked car with his mistress, a man (a fellow KGB officer) knocked on the window. Thinking his spying had been discovered, he jumped out and stabbed the man, killing him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 12 years in jail in the fall of 1982.

While in jail, he carelessly let slip in letters that he had been involved in "something big" before going to jail; these writings, monitored of course by the KGB, led to his eventual unmasking as a defector. As part of his confession, he wrote a blistering denunciation of the Soviet system, The Confession of a Traitor. News of his subsequent execution reached France in March, 1983.

The information he had provided led to a mass expulsion of nearly 150 Soviet technology spies around the world; the French alone expelled 47 Soviet spies, most of who were from Line X. This caused the collapse of the desperately-needed information program at a time when it was particularly crucial. A more subtle response was engineered by the U.S., which created a massive operation to provide the Soviets with both faulty data, as well as sabotaged parts (see Farewell Dossier for more).

In an odd co-incidence, one of his interrogators had been Vitaly Yurchenko, and it is thought that the Vetrov case was one of the main reasons for Yurchenko's defection.