Ivan Ivanovich Agayants (1911-1968) was a Soviet foreign intelligence officer who became the first head of the KGB’s specialized disinformation unit. An Armenian-born career officer of the foreign intelligence service, he served abroad in posts including Tehran and Paris. In 1959 he was put in charge of the newly created Department D of the KGB First Chief Directorate, the unit responsible for disinformation and other active measures, which was later expanded and renamed Service A.

Under Agayants the KGB institutionalized forgeries, planted stories, and coordinated campaigns with allied Soviet-bloc services, notably the Czechoslovak and East German services, which set up their own disinformation departments on the Soviet model. Defectors and historians credit him with building the bureaucratic foundation of Cold War dezinformatsiya. He died in 1968.

Sources

• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.
• Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
• Bittman, Ladislav. The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare. Syracuse University Research Corporation, 1972.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.