MOSCOW. Sept 17 (Interfax) - There were people in the Soviet Union's top leadership of the 70s and 80s who spied for the United States, a veteran Soviet intelligence agent said in an interview published in a newspaper on Friday.
"It is true. Some people joined the highest echelons of authority who were by no means supposed to know about our results. The so-called 'Kryuchkov list' with the names of those people from the American network of agents was no figment of the imagination," Yury Drozdov, who for many years headed the undercover division of Soviet intelligence, told Russian government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
"I'm sure of this [that there were people spying for the U.S. in the top Soviet leadership]. Our intelligence material confirmed this," he said.
"In one of my conversations with the then head of intelligence, [Vladimir] Kryuchkov [who headed foreign intelligence in 1974-1988], I said accidentally, 'You know, Vladimir Alexandrovich, we should be as cautious as possible in working with our material,'" Drozdov said.
Drozdov also said that after Soviet agent Rudolf Abel was arrested in the U.S. in 1957, Moscow replaced him with another undercover agent, "Georgy," who worked together with a German woman on his U.S. mission.
"In New York, Georgy was considered to be one of the former Nazis," Drozdov said.
"He was one of our normal Russian guys, not young and with serious errors in the German language, someone who yet needed to be made a foreigner," Drozdov said. Georgy's specialist field was innovative technology.
"Anyway, he did a large amount of work for the country. His material was very useful," Drozdov said.