Defectors Through History

Defectors are intelligence jackpots and traps in one person. Oleg Gordievsky brought the inner fears of the KGB to London. Oleg Penkovsky carried Washington through the Cuban Missile Crisis with documents on Soviet missiles.

Vasili Mitrokhin walked out of Moscow with an archive. Adolf Tolkachev handed over Soviet radar designs for six years. But the traffic also includes fabricators and baited hooks: the source called Curveball invented an Iraqi biological weapons program, and the contradictory defector Nosenko split the CIA for a decade.

Services walk every newcomer through months of hostile crosschecking before trusting a sentence. History ranks defectors among the most valuable sources, and among the most dangerous..