- Yuri Drozdov was born on September 19, 1925 in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR, USSR [now Belarus]. He died on June 21, 2017 in Russia.
- He served in WWII as an artilleryman. After the war he attended the Military Institute for Languages, a finishing school for Soviet spies, and joined the KGB in 1956. As a KGB agent based in East Germany he took part in the exchange of US pilot Francis Gary Powers for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, which was dramatized in Bridge of Spies (2015).
- His father was in the Bolshevik worker militias known as the Red Guards.
- In 1975 he became the chief KGB officer at the Soviet Union's UN office in New York. In 1979 he led KGB forces that stormed the Afghan presidential palace, toppling the president and paving the way for the Soviet invasion.
- He was the chief of the KGB's Directorate S, in charge of Soviet spies planted abroad under false identities. He oversaw training of agents to talk, think and act like Americans, Brits, Germans or Frenchmen. Information gathered by these deep-cover agents was passed to handlers through dead-drops, by radio, or covert meetings abroad.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content