KGB Spetsnaz seek to re-employ Soviet Spymaster’s Unique Methods Against Western Counterintelligence

 Last Saturday marked the 95th anniversary of the birth of Yuri Drozdov, the KGB major-general in charge of planting illegal Soviet agents in countries across the West.

The KGB’s illegals programme was often able to outplay its opponents in western counterintelligence thanks to the non-conventional tactics employed by the man running it - Directorate ‘C’ chief Yuri Drozdov, says Valery Popov, one of Drozdov’s protégés.

Speaking  on the anniversary of the superspy’s birth, Popov, a veteran of the KGB special forces unit Vympel, which Drozdov created in 1981, said that his mentor was a “brilliant” operative with a penchant for enigmatic, out of the box thinking.

According to Popov, this was amply demonstrated with the case of Alexei Kozlov, the Soviet spy arrested in Apartheid South Africa in 1981 while gathering intelligence about the country’s illegal nuclear weapons programme.

“Kozlov was arrested in the early 1980s, put on death row in a South African prison, and tortured. But he survived, was exchanged for several western intelligence officers, and returned to his homeland,” Popov recalled.

After some time passed, Kozlov asked his superiors to send him abroad again. “In the end, Drozdov agreed. This was a genius decision. He understood that operational work was Kozlov’s whole life. He calculated that no one would believe that an illegal agent who had been uncovered and who was known by sight could ever be sent abroad again. Seems illogical, right? And it worked!” Popov said.

Kozlov was sent abroad in 1986, where he remained until 1997. His activities and place of residence during this period remains unknown to this day. It was thanks to Kozlov’s work that the USSR discovered that Apartheid South Africa carried out a nuclear test in 1979 together with Israel, and learned that the country was producing enriched uranium in occupied Namibia. These findings made it possible for Moscow to persuade the United States and multiple Western European countries to strengthen international sanctions against South Africa, with the restrictions ultimately helping to topple the Apartheid regime in 1994.

According to Popov, intelligence work is often compared with chess, but is really more complex. “I think the chess comparison is an inaccurate one, because chess is limited by the board, and all of the pieces have strict rules when it comes to how they can be moved. In intelligence work, there is no board or rules for the 'pieces'…Drozdov played real life, operational chess, which was unpredictable for the opponent.”

Popov suggested that “Drozdov’s genius also lay in the fact that he knew how to put together different people – different nationalities, different temperaments, with different training, including physically and linguistically. And depending on the mission handed down by command, it was possible to assemble the group to carry it out quickly, to defeat the enemy in operational chess using unusual moves.”, who currently serves as president of the Association of Vympel Veterans, says the KGB special forces unit is comparable with “a scalpel in the hands of a skilled neurosurgeon,” with its missions not limited to combat operations, but also including the ability to work "in the dark", infiltrating the mission area, carrying out the mission, and leaving without a trace, without the use of weapons if possible.

During the Soviet crisis of August 1991, Vympel was mobilised to storm the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin and his aides were holed up in resistance to Communist hardliners’ efforts to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev. However, the order to carry out the operation never came through, and after the crisis was over, the Communist Party was banned and the KGB, military and other security agencies were reorganized and purged. Drozdov was retired two months earlier, in June 1991.

He died in 2017, would have turned 95 on Saturday. A veteran of the Second World War who took part in the storming of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the KGB officer headed the Soviet illegals program between 1979 and 1991, and is believed to have helped plant hundreds of "illegal" agents in western countries in that time. 

Before heading the illegals department, Drozdov repeatedly worked in the field as an illegal agent himself, using his excellent command of German to pretend to be the cousin of Soviet agent Rudolf Abel during the operation to bring him to the Soviet Union in 1962, and infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers in the West German government while posing as a former SS officer. In the 1960s, he also served as a KGB resident in China, and in the United States.