Konstantin Georgiyevich Preobrazhenskiy (Russian: Константин Георгиевич Преображенский; born in 1953 in Moscow) is a former KGB officer, an intelligence expert and the author of several books and numerous articles about Russian secret police organizations.
He is known for his publications about KGB operations in Japan, recruitment of Russian emigrants by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, and infiltration of Russian Orthodox Church by the KGB/Federal Security Service (FSB).
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He graduated from the Institute of Asian and African countries of the Moscow State University in 1976 and started working in the Foreign Intelligence department of the KGB. He was an advisor on China, Japan and Korea to Leonid Zaitsev, the Head of the Scientific and Technical Intelligence (Directorate “T”), in the First Chief Directorate.
In 1980-85 Preobrazhenskiy worked under cover as a TASS correspondent at the KGB station in Tokyo.[1] He recruited Chinese scholars for the Soviet Scientific and Technical Intelligence. In July 1985, the Japanese police arrested him at a meeting with his Chinese agent, and he was transferred back to Moscow. He described these events in book “The Spy Who Loved Japan” published in 1994.
In 1991 Preobrazhenskiy left the KGB and started writing books and articles about Russian state security services and on various political subjects. In 1993-2002 he worked as a columnist for the Moscow Timesnewspaper .
He fled to the United States in January 2003, after several episodes of harassment by Russian state security services. He was granted political asylum in March 2006 [2]
He is a regular speaker on the Voice of America and was a lecturer at Columbia, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. He was an invited speaker at The Intelligence Summit. His last book is "KGB/FSB's New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent" [3]
He had numerous meetings with former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and commented on his assassination:
According to Konstantinov, Putin initially worked in the 5-th KGB department that was responsible for suppression of internal dissent in the country[5]