Ovakimyan, Gaik Badalovich

(1898–1975)

   Known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the “wily Armenian,” Ovakimyan served as the NKVD case officer and illegal rezident in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s. Ovakimyan’s greatest success was in the recruitment of agents with access to scientific and industrial information. In 1939 Ovakimyan’s rezidentura sent 18,000 pages of technical documents to Moscow. By 1941 the NKVD network in the United States, for which he laid the basic building blocks, included 221 agents. In May 1941, however, the FBI caught Ovakimyan in the act of espionage. After a brief imprisonment, he was allowed to return to Moscow, where he served as a general officer in the NKVD. Many of Ovakimyan’s stable of recruits provided critical information about U.S. military technology during and immediately after World War II. Following the war, Ovakimyan left the intelligence service and went back into scientific work.