Word: gru
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...confirmed that the most important of Ames' victims by far was Polyakov, whose briefing transcripts and photocopies of secret documents fill 25 file drawers in the agency's innermost sanctum. Many intelligence experts now believe that Polyakov made a far more important contribution than a more famous GRU turncoat, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was executed in 1963 for supplying the U.S. with information during the Cuban missile crisis. Of all the secret agents the U.S. recruited during the cold war, says CIA director James Woolsey, "Polyakov was the jewel in the crown...
...bookkeeper, Polyakov was born in the Ukraine in 1921, attended military school, and won decorations for bravery as an artillery officer during World War II. After the war, he studied at the Soviet equivalent of West Point before signing on as a spy for the GRU...
...would not accept much money: no more than $3,000 a year, conveyed mostly in the form of Black & Decker power tools, a pair of work overalls, fishing gear and shotguns. He asked for a lot of trinkets such as lighters and pens, which he gave to other GRU officers who did him favors. Unlike most Soviet officers known to the FBI and CIA, he drank and smoked little and was faithful to his wife...
...more practical level, Polyakov wanted his two sons to be well educated and placed in professional jobs, which could be assured by his rise in the GRU. His career, in turn, was aided by the CIA, which gave him some minor secrets and provided two Americans whom he presented as the fruits of his recruiting. They became double agents for the CIA. A year after signing on with the FBI, Polyakov was posted back to Moscow, where he had access to GRU penetrations of Western intelligence. Before long he began serving up moles, including Frank Bossard, a guided-missile researcher...
...suspicions that he may have been a Soviet plant were allayed by the quality of the information he provided. In the late 1960s, while running the GRU's key listening post in Rangoon, Polyakov gave the CIA everything the Soviets collected from there on the Vietnamese and Chinese armed forces. Rotated back to Moscow as head of the GRU's China section, he photographed crucial documents tracking that country's bitter split with Moscow. A CIA specialist on Sino-Soviet relations drew on rich detail from a Soviet source -- whom he learned just last week was Polyakov -- that enabled...