Word: martynov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Valeri Martynov: In November 1980, Martynov arrived in Washington with his wife Natalia to take up his duties, ostensibly as third secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington. He was actually a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. In the spring of 1982, however, he was recruited through a joint FBI-CIA courtship program and began feeding information to the Americans...
From the CIA's point of view, Martynov's importance lay in his potential as a sleeper agent who might rise through the ranks and prove useful in the future. After Ames betrayed him, however, the KGB ordered him to return to Moscow in November 1985. Martynov told his wife and his two young children that he would be back in Washington shortly. Ten days later, Natalia received a note from her husband asking her to come back to Moscow with their son and daughter. As soon as their plane landed, Natalia realized that her husband was in trouble...
...apartment and brought her to Moscow's Lefortovo prison for interrogation. The KGB questioned her repeatedly. During the next two years, as KGB counterintelligence officers investigated the case, she was allowed to see her husband only four times. The last time she brought her son with her, knowing Martynov had been sentenced to death. He was executed by a firing squad on May 28, 1987. He was 41 years...
...time, CIA and FBI officials received three grave indicators that they had a mole in their midst. Before they could arrest Howard, he fled to Moscow, seemingly tipped off that the net was closing fast. Perhaps more damaging for intelligence operations, the 1980 Operation Courtship double agents, Motorin and Martynov, were ordered back to Moscow and executed. Again, a mole's touch was indicated...
...Ames was the hand behind the Howard, Motorin and Martynov debacles -- as is now suspected -- he was a cool number. In 1986 he passed the polygraph test routinely administered to intelligence officials every five years. By then there were subtle changes in Ames' behavior, but nothing that a lie detector would pick up. Colleagues still found Ames unsophisticated and lazy, but his dullness had been replaced by a cavalier attitude and an appetite for drinking and dancing. Agency hands recall Ames' sitting with his feet propped on his desk, smoking cigarettes and reading old counterintelligence files. He also spent...