Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov (Russian: Юрий Иванович Дроздов; 19 September 1925 – 21 June 2017) was a Soviet security official. In 1979, he led Operation Storm-333, formally triggering the Soviet–Afghan War.[1][2] Later, as a high-level agent of the KGB, he oversaw the execution of the "Illegals Program" in the United States from 1979 until 1991.[1] Drozdov was a recipient of the Order of Lenin, which was conferred to him in 1981.[3]
Early life
Yuri Ivanovich was born in Minsk to the former Anastasia Kuzminichna Pankevich (1898-1987) from Lepel, Belarus, and Ivan Dmitrievich Drozdov (1894-1978).
His mother, Anastasia Kuzminichna, was a Belarusian typist with the English paper factory in Pereslavl-Zalessky, and then, after the Russian Civil War, in the secretariat of the then NKVD of Byelorussia.[4][5][6] Her father, Kuzma Pankevich, fought as a partisan during the Great Patriotic War falling ill and dying at over 90 years old in 1943 near his home next to the Lepel Cemetery where he had been a guard since the Revolution.[5]
In 1940, Yuri Ivanovich began his military training at the 14th Special Artillery School in Kharkiv where his father had been on the faculty since 1937.[3][4] When the war began, he evacuated to Aktyubinsk to work at a tank repair plant.[3] He was only 17 when he graduated from school in June 1943 and entered the Red Army in July 1943 for military training at the Red Army Military Technical Academy (the Leningrad Artillery School known today as Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy (Russian: Михайловская военная артиллерийская академия).[3] During the Great Patriotic War, he was a Lieutenant on the 1st Belorussian Front and commanded a fire platoon of an anti-tank battalion under the command of famed Nestor Kozin in the 52nd Guards Rifle Division which victoriously entered Berlin in the spring of 1945.[3][6] He served with distinction receiving the Order of the Red Star (Russian: Орден Красной Звезды).[9] Following the War, he continued his service with the Red Army and later the Soviet Army in Germany and the Baltics.[4] In 1952, Drozdov began his studies of German and English at the Soviet Army's Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow and then, in 1956, graduated as a German and English linguist and transferred to the KGB.[4][10]
In the spring of 1957 until August, he began his illegals career posing as a Silesian in Leipzig and then transferred to Berlin where he, under Alexander Mikhailovich Korotkov, the KGB commander in the GDR, was a KGB liaison officer to the Stasi, living in West Berlin to increase his fluency and become more convincing in his alias.[4][6][11] He had several roles as an illegal including the violent SS man Baron Hoenshtein, who received valuable intelligence information from his connections, and then as Inspector Kleinert, who obtained cover documents for other Soviet illegals.[4] This was merely the beginning of the most illustrious person in the history of the KGB's First Chief Directorate.[10]
In 1963, he returned to Moscow for graduate studies.[4] In 1964-1968 during the Cultural Revolution, he served as the KGB resident in Communist China which also was a time of increased Sino-Soviet tensions.[11] In New York in 1975–1979, he became the Soviet Union's deputy representative to the United Nations as the KGB resident.[6][11]
Paving the way for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as the new KGB Chief of Directorate S,[a] he led the 43 minute Special Operation Storm-333[b] beginning at 7:30pm on Friday, December 27, 1979, in which KGB forces stormed the Afghan presidential palace replacing President Hafizullah Amin with their own puppet Babrak Karmal.[1] This action was the beginning phase of the Soviet Union's protracted Soviet Union-Afghanistan War (1979-1989). He led the Directorate S until 1991 establishing Vympel within the KGB's First Chief Directorate as a dedicated spetsnaz unit that specialized in deep penetration, sabotage, universal direct and covert action, protection of Soviet embassies and espionagecell activation in case of war.[12]
After his resignation from the KGB, he worked for his company, Namakon (Namacon in the West), to provide security and logistics to foreign businessmen, political analysis, and finding office space and performing background checks for Western businesses in Russia.[1][6]
^Directorate S is the illegals section of the KGB. Previously from 1974 to 1979, Vadim Kirpichenko headed Directorate S.
^Storm-333 was part of the much larger Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan code named Operation Baikal-79 which began at 3pm on December 25, 1979.[4] The Soviet leadership intended to stop the CIA from establishing a new Great Ottoman Empire with the Soviet Union's central Asian republics, secure this southern Soviet region, which lacked proper air defenses, from possible Pershing-type missile attacks, prevent Pakistan and Iran from gaining Afghan uranium deposits, stop the CIA's support of the Basmachi movement, and to prevent the United States from gaining the precious resources of Tajikistan and the Pamirs.[4]
^ abcde"ДРОЗДОВ Юрий Иванович" [The history of domestic special services and law enforcement agencies: Drozdov, Yuri Ivanovich]. История отечественных спецслужб и правоохранительных органов (in Russian). Retrieved 6 December 2017.
^ abcДРОЗДОВ, ЮРИЙ (15 May 2017). "2 ВМЕСТО АНКЕТЫ". Записки начальника нелегальной разведки [Notes of the Chief of Illegal Intelligence] (in Russian). OLMA-PRESS. Retrieved 8 December 2017 – via litra.pro.
