Oleg Kalugin - Exile in The United States

Exile in The United States

According to Kalugin, he has never betrayed any Soviet agents except those who were already known to Western intelligence. He criticized intelligence defectors like Gordievsky as "traitors."

In 1995 he accepted a teaching position in The Catholic University of America and has remained in the United States ever since. Settling in Washington, D.C., he wrote a book about Cold War espionage entitled The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West, a more recent book Spymaster in 2008, and collaborated with former CIA Director William Colby and Activision to produce Spycraft: The Great Game, a CD-ROM game released in 1996. He has appeared frequently in the media and given lectures at a number of universities. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States on August 4, 2003.

With the return to power of elements of the KGB, most notably Vladimir Putin, Kalugin was again accused of treason. In 2002 he was put on trial in absentia in Moscow and found guilty of spying for the West. He was sentenced to fifteen years in jail, in a verdict he described as "Soviet justice, which is really triumphant today". The US and Russia have no extradition treaty.

Kalugin currently works for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI CENTRE) is a member of the advisory board for the International Spy Museum. He remains a critic of Vladimir Putin, a former subordinate, whom he called a "war criminal" over his conduct of the Second Chechen War.

Read more about this topic:  Oleg Kalugin

Famous quotes containing the words united states, exile, united and/or states:

    “On the whole, yes, I would rather be the Chief Justice of the United States, and a quieter life than that which becomes at the White House is more in keeping with the temperament, but when taken into consideration that I go into history as President, and my children and my children’s children are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.”
    —William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    “No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
    —Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    “Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don’t pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.”
    —John Paxton (1911–1985)