Oleg Danilovich Kalugin (born 1934 in Leningrad) is a former KGB major general who became one of the most prominent public critics of the service. He studied at Columbia University as an exchange student in 1958-1959, then served in New York under cover as a Radio Moscow correspondent and later at the Soviet embassy in Washington, where he worked as deputy head of the KGB residency in the late 1960s. In 1973 he became the youngest general in the First Chief Directorate and headed its foreign counterintelligence directorate until 1980, when he was moved to a post in Leningrad.

In 1990 Kalugin publicly criticized the KGB, was stripped of his rank and decorations by Mikhail Gorbachev, and was then elected to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. He moved to the United States in 1995 and testified for the prosecution in the 2001 espionage trial of retired U.S. Army colonel George Trofimoff. In 2002 a Moscow court convicted him in absentia of high treason and sentenced him to 15 years. His memoir describes KGB operations against the United States and the KGB’s support for the 1978 Bulgarian assassination of dissident Georgi Markov in London.

Sources

• Kalugin, Oleg. The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
• Kalugin, Oleg. Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. Basic Books, 2009.
• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.

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