Peter Deriabin

Deriabin was a member of the Communist Party. He went to Biysk Teachers College as well as the Institute for Marxism-Leninism.

Defection and subsequent career

Defection In 1953 following Stalin's death, Deriabin was stationed in Vienna as Chief of Soviet Counterintelligence as well as Communist Party boss for the entire Austro-German section. In 1954, he defected to the United States "via a freight train ride through Soviet occupied territory near Vienna," and was the highest ranking Soviet intelligence officer to have done so at the time. He chose the Americans because he felt they "won't cave in when the USSR demands my return". Deriabin contended that the Soviets would have accomplished several objectives by eliminating Kennedy. Among them was removing the West's preeminent cold warrior from the scene, constraining US covert actions against Cuba, which would be stigmatized as acts of vengeance, as well as diverting the Soviet people's attention from their many domestic problems.

He was also involved in the Yuri Nosenko case as an interrogator and as the editor of the secret recordings made of Nosenko's meetings with Tennent H. Bagley and George Kisevalter (in which he found 150 errors made by the native-Russian-speaking Kisevalter; see pages 580-81 in Bagley's 1978 HSCA testimony as "Mr. D.C." -- as in "Deputy Chief" in HSCA Report, Volume XII at maryferrell.org). Nosenko was a controversial Soviet defector who was interrogated harshly (but not torturously) by the CIA, detained under Spartan living conditions (including solitary confinement), and presumed to be a KGB plant by Bagley, James Angleton, and the Chief of the Soviet Russia Division, David E. Murphy, from 1964 until he was "cleared" in late 1968 by possible KGB "mole" Bruce Solie, and released. Deriabin was one of the CIA officials who believed he was a plant, claiming that the details of Nosenko's stories about his experiences in SMERSH and the KGB didn't match up with Deriabin's own experience in those agencies.

Deriabin retired from the CIA in 1981.