Kalugin, Oleg Danilovich

(1934– )

   Kalugin rose quickly in the KGB’s foreign intelligence component to become chief of foreign counterintelligence in the First Chief Directorate and the youngest general officer in the service. Kalugin was instrumental in running Robert Lipka as well as the Walker Spy Ring. Lipka, a young employee of the National Security Agency, was paid $27,000. John Walker was paid more than a hundred times more for information on U.S. cryptological systems. Kalugin was successful as well in the recruitment of a number of Western intelligence officers.

   Kalugin was transferred to Leningrad as deputy chief of the city KGB in the early 1980s. Within a short period of time, he made a number of enemies in the party bureaucracy and his career floundered. He later rallied to Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost and wrote several articles on his career in intelligence. Kalugin was never forgiven by his former colleagues for his decision to break cover, and in the 1990s he moved to the United States, where he teaches and acts as a business consultant. He has since been condemned by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a traitor, and he was tried in absentia and sentenced to a prison term.