Stanislav Levchenko

Stanislav Levchenko

Stanislav Alexandrovich Levchenko (born July 28, 1941) is a former Russian KGB major who defected the United States in 1979. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1989.

Levchenko was born in Moscow, obtained an education at the Institute of Asia and Africa of Lomonosov Moscow State University, and pursued graduate studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His first KGB work came in 1968, after he had worked for the GRU for two years. He became fully employed by the agency in 1971. In 1975, he was sent undercover abroad, as a journalist working for the Russian magazine New Times (Novoye Vremya) in Tokyo, Japan.

Levchenko defected the United States in October 1979, and was instrumental in detailing the KGB's Japanese spy network to the U.S government, including in Congressional testimony in the early 1980s.

After his defection, Levchenko supplied the names of about 200 Japanese agents who had been also defecting earlier. Included in his list were a former labour minister for the Liberal Democratic Party, Hirohide Ishida (石田 博英), and Socialist Party leader Seiichi Katsumata (勝間田 清一). Takuji Yamane of the newspaper Sankei Shimbun was also mentioned.

A Soviet court condemned Levchenko to death in 1981. Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov tried to hunt him down in the United States, but they were exposed in the Richard Miller spy case.

Levchenko published his English-language autobiography, On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB, in 1988. A Japanese version, KGB no Mita Nihon ("The KGB's View of Japan") was published in 1985.