Agency CI STaff Adviser Anatoliy M. GOLITSYN
ANATOLIY MIKHAYLOVICH GOLITSYN
The later intelligence officer and influential defector was born in the Ukrainian city of Piryatin amidst the summer of nineteen twenty-six. Upon completing his early schooling Anatoliy would serve the local Communist Party Youth organization and later enrolled at the Frunze Artillery School. Following his graduation, Golitsyn was transferred to Soviet military intelligence and trained in counterintelligence during the nineteen forties. He was eventually appointed to desk officer for the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security or Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (MGB). Golitsyn successfully oversaw Chinese operations for Soviet intelligence and during the early nineteen fifties was transferred to the Anglo-American Section of the Counterintelligence Department at Moscow headquarters. Anatoliy was promoted to Senior Operational Case Officer and was among those advising Russian leaders in regard to overhauling the Soviet intelligence apparatus following WWII.
A year later following the death of Stalin, Golitsyn was serving the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) as the Deputy Chief of the Russian Emigre Desk. By nineteen fifty-four decades of intelligence training paired with loyal service to Soviet intelligence groups allowed Golitsyn to easily join the newly formed KGB’s base in Austria’s capital city. He was tasked with focusing on the “penetration of foreign intelligence services” and this period would mold Anatoliy’s beliefs that Western intelligence was penetrated with Soviet moles. Multiple Russian attempts to penetrate Western intelligence influenced Golitsyn’s paranoia that many Soviet moles were already in place without the notice of Western clandestine groups. Several reassignments later he possessed diplomatic cover within the Helsinki Soviet Embassy and served the American Section of the KGB’s First Directorate in the course of nineteen sixty. Golitsyn was prompted to defect with his family in the winter of nineteen sixty-one due to an increasingly hostile relationship with the Embassy’s commanding officer and his reportedly ignored demands to reorganize the KGB.
Golitsyn in the Press After His Defection
Following his defection and exfiltration to the United States, Golitsyn would find a welcome ally in CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton. Following a series of contentious debriefings the counterintelligence leader in time assumed control of the defector’s case from the Agency’s Soviet Division. The two men found a simpatico belief that Western intelligence groups had been repeatedly penetrated by the Soviets using multiple yet unknown agents. This led to over a decade of hunting for moles based on Golitsyn’s often unproven ideas within multiple Western intelligence groups. These hunts crippled CIA Soviet Division operations, led to employee dismissals, endless internal accusations, and the death or imprisonment of multiple defectors that Golitsyn’s accused of treachery. He would over time claim that CIA officers Serge Peter Karlow, Richard Kovich, and multiple others were KGB agents in the service of Moscow. Golitsyn further asserted that proven defectors akin to Oleg Penkovsky or Dmitri Polyakov were merely Soviet plants despite that both died for their cooperation. Following James Angleton’s dismissal and the crippling of CISIG during the nineteen seventies Anatoliy Golitsyn lost his influential position but he continued to be propagate his allegations for decades. Golitsyn authored multiple books to support his earlier claims and would allege several KGB agents lurked in the political leadership of at least five countries.
