Yuri Nosenko, KGB defector, said to be dead in U.S.
Yuri Nosenko, a former Soviet agent who was at the center of some of the most dramatic espionage episodes of the Cold War, died Saturday under an assumed name, somewhere in the southern United States, a senior American intelligence official said on Wednesday. He was 81.
In a statement with fittingly sparse information, given Nosenko's earlier life as a KGB spy and his later life in the shadows, the senior official said he could provide no details about the cause of death or Nosenko's survivors, if any. The official himself would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Only last month, several senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency visited Nosenko to present him with an American flag and a letter from Michael Hayden, the director of central intelligence, thanking him for his service and, by implication, offering a final apology for the way he was treated after he defected to the United States in the winter of 1964.
Nosenko's defection seemed to have been motivated in part by his fondness for Western culture. He also said he needed money to repay some KGB money he had lost in Geneva after a night with a prostitute and a bottle of vodka in 1962. So he began spying in Moscow for the CIA, and eventually decided that his future lay in the United States.
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In a statement with fittingly sparse information, given Nosenko's earlier life as a KGB spy and his later life in the shadows, the senior official said he could provide no details about the cause of death or Nosenko's survivors, if any. The official himself would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Only last month, several senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency visited Nosenko to present him with an American flag and a letter from Michael Hayden, the director of central intelligence, thanking him for his service and, by implication, offering a final apology for the way he was treated after he defected to the United States in the winter of 1964.
Nosenko's defection seemed to have been motivated in part by his fondness for Western culture. He also said he needed money to repay some KGB money he had lost in Geneva after a night with a prostitute and a bottle of vodka in 1962. So he began spying in Moscow for the CIA, and eventually decided that his future lay in the United States.