Yury Drozdov

Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov (; 19 September 1925 – 21 June 2017) was a Soviet security official. In 1979, he led Operation Storm-333, formally triggering the Soviet–Afghan War. Later, as a high-level agent of the KGB, he oversaw the execution of the "Illegals Program" in the United States from 1979 until 1991. Drozdov was a recipient of the Order of Lenin, which was conferred to him in 1981.

Early life Yuri Ivanovich was born in Minsk to the former Anastasia Kuzminichna Pankevich (1898-1987) from Lepel, Belarus, and Ivan Dmitrievich Drozdov (1894-1978).

His mother, Anastasia Kuzminichna, was a Belarusian typist with the English paper factory in Pereslavl-Zalessky, and then, after the Russian Civil War, in the secretariat of the then NKVD of Byelorussia. Her father, Kuzma Pankevich, fought as a partisan during the Great Patriotic War falling ill and dying at over 90 years old in 1943 near his home next to the Lepel Cemetery where he had been a guard since the Revolution. He met Anastasia while he was in Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Red Army campaign on Warsaw during the Polish–Soviet War. He spent one and a half years recovering from a bullet wound to his lungs. Following the War, he continued his service with the Red Army and later the Soviet Army in Germany and the Baltics.

In the spring of 1957 until August, he began his illegals career posing as a Silesian in Leipzig and then transferred to Berlin where he, under Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Korotkov, the KGB commander in the GDR, was a KGB liaison officer to the Stasi, living in West Berlin to increase his fluency and become more convincing in his alias. He had several roles as an illegal including the violent SS man Baron Hoenshtein, who received valuable intelligence information from his connections, and then as Inspector Kleinert, who obtained cover documents for other Soviet illegals.

After his resignation from the KGB, he worked for his company, Namakon (Namacon in the West), to provide security and logistics to foreign businessmen, political analysis, and finding office space and performing background checks for Western businesses in Russia. He died in Moscow on 21 June 2017 and was buried with military honors at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

Awards and decorations Soviet Union and Russia

Honorary State Security Officer jubilee medals

Foreign

government awards of Cuba

Books he authored

Fartishev, Vasily, and Drozdov, Yuri. Юрий Андропов и Владимир Путин. На пути к возрождению in Russian. translated title: Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin: on the path for revitalizing. Moscow. Olma Press. 2001. 352 pages. .