Live and Let Spy

Note: Transcript is from an earlier broadcast and may contain some inaccuracies.

OLEG KALUGIN: My name is Oleg Kalugin. I’m a former Soviet intelligence officer. That was my main job, to recruit Americans to work for the Soviet Union.

BRIAN: Oleg Kalugin says he knew he wanted to be a spy as early as his teenage years. When he graduated high school in 1953, he joined the KGB. The KGB, like the CIA, took advantage of the cultural exchange programs established between the Eisenhower and Khrushchev administrations at the time. When Kalugin landed in New York City in 1958, the Soviet intelligence agency told Kalugin to get acquainted with the city and the American people.

PETER: He found Times Square’s ubiquitous advertisements to be vulgar, and was shocked at the homelessness in lower Manhattan. But Kalugin found the American people quite friendly.

OLEG KALUGIN: I was not supposed to recruit anyone, that I was in training for the Soviet’s intelligent system. But I just accidentally almost recruited the man, an American, who had access to classified information. This man I bumped into on the campus of Columbia University, and we struck a conversation. And he said in the first minutes of our conversation that he hates Khrushchev, because he betrayed the cause of communism. Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time.

I said, come on, listen. Why don’t we go to the cafeteria, and we’ll talk about what’s happening. So I told him, if you want Russia to become, or the Soviet Union to become a stronger, more powerful nation, why don’t you share your knowledge or experience with the Soviets, and that will be your contribution to the better life of the Soviet people?

PETER: It turned out the man worked for a major American military contractor and had access to classified information about advanced weaponry. The KGB thought Kalugin might have an FBI agent on his hands, but they gave him the go ahead for another meeting.

OLEG KALUGIN: He brought some samples and documents, classified at that time. And that was the beginning of my career.

PETER: Kalugin’s job, after that moment, only got more interesting. He traveled around the country, recruiting other informants, while under the cover of a journalist for Radio Moscow.

BRIAN: By the 1970’s, Kalugin was a big shock. He helped run the KGB’s Washington office, becoming the youngest general in that agency’s history. He eventually returned to Moscow as head of foreign counterintelligence. When the Soviet Union crumbled, Kalugin forged a new life, as a businessman. He served as Vice President of a Russian telecommunications partnership with AT&T, and he continued to navigate between the two worlds of Russia and the United States, until 2001.

OLEG KALUGIN: I was summoned by the prosecutor of the United States to come down to Florida as a witness at the trial of Colonel Trofimoff, the man who was a Soviet source for many years.

BRIAN: Kalugin testified against a retired American colonel and fellow Soviet spy. Now, you might assume that a decade after the Soviet system fell apart, there wouldn’t be much danger of retribution. Unfortunately, for Kalugin, Russia had a new leader.

OLEG KALUGIN: At some point, one of my former subordinates, by name, Vladimir Putin, called me once publicly a traitor. And I said, how could you call me a traitor without due legal process? Aren’t you a graduate of the law school of Leningrad University? I am ashamed of you, people like you.

BRIAN: Kalugin and Putin threw barbs back and forth in the press. Kalugin even accused the new president of having committed war crimes in Chechnya in the mid 1990s. Kalugin soon realized that he would not return to Russia.

OLEG KALUGIN: And a few months later, the Russian military tribunal charged me officially with treason.

BRIAN: And so after a life spent trying to get Americans to betray their own country, Kalugin was labeled a traitor in his own homeland. Yet, even in his spying days, Kalugin says he didn’t quite see the US as an enemy. What he enjoyed most about the work was an ideological, he says. It was the mechanics of the job. It was traveling around the United States. It was chatting up strangers. It was building relationships.

OLEG KALUGIN: Meeting hundreds of people, just trying to select those who may be eventually of use to you and your service. That’s a great job, I tell you. I liked it.

BRIAN: Kalugin told us that the warm welcome he received wherever he went, made his intelligence work easy. Ultimately, it was that same warmth and trust that made it possible for Kalugin to call America his home. Oleg Kalugin teaches at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia.